Dell says its new 4U, 4 socket rack offering will offer a much better price-performance alternative to legacy RISC-based systems, and one that should appeal to partners who serve the Big Data analytics market.
The new PowerEdge R930
While the market has known it is coming for a while, today Dell is announcing the PowerEdge R930 server, a new four-socket, 4U server designed for mission-critical applications.
“This expands our family of 13th generation PowerEdge servers,” said Ravi Pendekanti, VP of PowerEdge product marketing and management at Dell. “The whole idea behind the R930 is that we have a new set of applications coming on, which are much more memory intensive, and which need a lot more RAM.”
Pendekanti said these new demands really constitute a paradigm shift in the industry.
“This four socket version of the 13G brings together optimal performance, and very rich management functionality,” he said. “This is something we are very proud of. A box is a box but people also need to be able to manage its functionality effectively. This beat the HANA deployment record by 20 per cent.”
Pendekanti said that 13Gs server management tools will significantly simply and automate management. For instance, iDRAC’s embedded Tech Support Report will significantly cut the IT admin time needed to identify and resolve server issues.
“It will cut troubleshooting time by 75 per cent,” he said. “It’s a first of its kind.”
Another is “ZeroTouch” Deployment’s fully automated configuration, which translates into 99 per cent less configuration time and fewer entry errors.
The increased feeds and speeds are also designed for these modern enterprise applications, such as in-memory databases, CRM and ERP. The R930 has 96 DIMMS, 8 Express Flash NVME PCIe SSD’s, and 24 SSD/HDD. The SSDs have 10X more I/O’s than traditional SSD’s, reflecting that Dell is the first to ship Express Flash NVMe PCIe SSD’s, creating front loading, hot pluggable 2.5” drives with 3.2 TB capacity each.
“These performance increases are by and large in-memory driven,” Pendekanti said. “We support up to 96 bits and have the capability to go up to a huge amount of memory, which is critical for HANA applications. We now have a lot more sockets and cores, which can also get your TCO down with socket licensing.”
That is part of what Pendekanti said is now the best price-performance in the industry.
“It’s a pretty compelling value proposition for us,” he said. “And because it is based on open standards, the beauty of this for our partners is that they can take it to customers and have it co-exist with existing product.”
Pendekanti emphasized this new offering is aimed squarely at the RISC install base to target UNIX to Linux migrations.
“It has a huge play there, as we really believe the enterprise market is prime for it now,” he said. “Customers who run these RISC systems do it for 3-5 years, and now when they refresh, they have a choice whether to invest again in these more expensive proprietary solutions, or in this. When we talk to customers we find lots who are concerned with what the RISC market and proprietary systems generally have gone through.”
Pendekanti predicted that early adopter customers would fall into three groups.
“One is high-end enterprise customers,” he said. “Another is those ones running RISC-based proprietary based systems who want to move to a better price-performance system. The third is organizations which can be mid-sized companies, but who want to use Big Data analytics heavily.”
Pendekanti said that this Big Data component is likely to be a key channel opportunity here.
“We are seeing a lot of interest in this on the channel side because big data and analytics is something their customers are interested in,” he said. “This will provide a perfect opportunity to talk with their customers, because Big Data is so hot.
The other channel opportunity is likely to come from the migration services occasioned by the transition from RISC platforms.
“These migration services should provide a strong opportunity,” he said. “This is a perfect solution for true value-add resellers.”
