Dell EMC has announced the worldwide availability of its 14th generation PowerEdge server portfolio for the data centre, and it’s the most software-defined hardware announcement the company has made yet.
After previewing the 14th Generation PowerEdge (14G) server portfolio back in May at Dell EMC World 2017, the servers are now available worldwide. The focus with this latest generation has been put on scalable business architecture, intelligent automation, and integrated security.
“14G is really the first new generation of servers that we have embedded with all of our strategy for the data centre,” said Mike Sharun, president of enterprise sales at Dell EMC Canada with CDN over the phone. “When you look at providing a solution back to the customers, it’s not about just one part of an overall data centre, it’s about the entire experience from end-to-end and having this integrated piece to providing the right level of service pack.”
The strategy revolves around the technology first being scalable. “You’ll see that 14G really can do more with a lot less. It is really the tagline or bedrock of the modern data centre,” said Sharun.
According to Dell EMC, the scalable business architecture of the PowerEdge servers give customers performance capabilities for traditional, virtualized, and cloud-native workloads in a software-defined data centre. It is optimized for non-volatile memory express (NVMe), and accelerates deployment of software-defined data storage and hyper-converged infrastructure stacks.
Highlights include lower database latency, live migration of virtual machines, and faster storage performance.
Second, is all the software in this announcement. Sharun points out that 14G has more software than what people may be used when it comes to a hardware announcement. “In order for customers to really grow and scale with where IT is going in their organization, they need to automate a lot of these tasks. The introduction of the open-managed application or architecture, to really help them automate and ensure that things happen a lot quicker in the data centre, is something that is really heads and tails above anything else,” he said.
The automation in the 14G PowerEdge servers include OpenManage Enterprise with RESTful API offers tools for automating deployment, updates, monitoring, and maintenance. It can be accessed through the OpenManage Enterprise management console.
Updates to that console include better server lifecycle management from deployment to retirement and re-purposing with the Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC9), and faster PowerEdge server issue resolution with predictive technology.
The third and final piece revolves around cyber security. “Throughout the manufacturing process all the way to deployment you can ensure the trustfulness and security of your environment. This is something that you wouldn’t have seen in past server announcements,” said Sharun.
Integrated security updates starts with cryptographically trusted booting that has features such as silicon-based root of trust, Intel Boot Guard protection, signed firmware, and automatic BIOS recovery. System Lockdown to secure system configuration from malicious or unintended changes while alerting the user of those possible changes, and System Era that allows users to retire or repurpose 14G servers are also included.
Dell EMC will continue to work with Intel and Intel’s Xeon Scalable processors with the 14G PowerEdge servers.
“The Xeon Scalable processors really form the basis for all of these announcements that we have today,” said Sharun. “They are going to end up giving us 27 per cent more CPU cores and 50 per cent more memory bandwidth, so we work hand-in-hand with Intel to bring these 14G servers out to market.”
Six of the 14th Generation PowerEdge server SKUS are available worldwide now, which you can view below. Further options will be made in the later half of 2017. Expect Dell EMC solutions based on the 14G servers to become available worldwide in the second half of the year as well.
- Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 – Ideal combination for dense scale-out data center computing and storage in a 1U/2-socket platform.
- Dell EMC PowerEdge R740 – Workhorse for demanding environments providing the ideal balance between storage, I/O and application acceleration and with superior configuration flexibility in a 2U/2S platform. R740 enables up to 50 percent more VDI users per server 8 and up to 50 percent more GPU accelerator support for Hadoop analytics 9.
- Dell EMC PowerEdge R740XD – This 2U/2S platform is best-in- class storage performance and density for applications like software-defined storage and with the versatility demanded by cloud service providers, Hadoop/Big Data users and co-location hosting.
- Dell EMC PowerEdge R940 – This 3U/ 4S platform handles extremely demanding, mission critical workloads like enterprise resource planning (ERP), e-commerce and very large databases. The PowerEdge R940 can save up to US $600,000 in Oracle Licensing costs 10 and performs up to 44% faster in a SAP SD Sybase Environment 11.
- Dell EMC PowerEdge M640 and FC640 – Unparalleled modular serves designed for high performance with best-in- class density for exceptional scalability in a Blade and Modular platform.
- Dell EMC PowerEdge C6420 – Ideal for high performance computing. Maximizes density, scalability and energy efficiency per unit in a 2U/8S Modular platform.