The enhancements to the four new 1U servers include their integration with Dell’s systems management portfolio, which provide tools that reduce deployment time by up to 40 per cent, and also provide streamlined management.

Today Dell is announcing the fourth and final wave of its thirteenth level of PowerEdge servers, which first began to be announced in September. The latest ones, two tower servers and two rack-mounted, are aimed at the low end of the market, from the SMB down to the SOHO.

“Dell is number one in the one-socket rack server market, and just shy of number one in the one-socket tower, but is closing the gap,” said Brian Payne, Executive Director/Server Platform at Dell. “There are a lot of improvements in these models.”

Some of the enhancements, like the upcoming Intel Xeon E3-1200 v5 processors and DD4 memory, are ones that other OEMs will get as well. The DD4 memory, which offers 33 per cent better performance than DD3, now eliminates the price premium that the DD3 used to have, an important feature for the often price-sensitive buyers in this market segment. But these new models will boast some features unique to Dell.

One that cuts across all these models is the availability for the first time in Dell entry-level servers of Dell’s systems management portfolio, which provide simple and intuitive tools that reduce deployment time by up to 40 per cent, and also provide streamlined management.

“The appetite for better performance among SMBs has increased, as well as providing more room for growth,” Payne said. “Both are now more important than in the past, based on recent research we have done at Dell. They are looking for productivity enhancements. They want help in connecting their employees and automating things. Many now want to run it all out of the cloud, but that’s not the majority. Traditional deployment is still the most common. From unit volume, we see very healthy demand from SMBs, even in green fields environments.”

The new tower servers are the T130, which replaces the T110 II, and the T 330, which replaces the T 320.

“The T130 is what we recommend for a first server, and it will also be a common replacements server in SOHO [Small Office/Home Office] environments,” Payne said. It has a mini-tower form factor, taking up less space than the full tower model it replaces. Its DDR4 memory, in addition to the 33 per cent faster performance, uses 30 per cent less active power and 50 per cent less standby power. It also has 64GB memory capacity, compared to the T110 II’s 32GB. The PCIe Gen3 I/O slots in this generation also drive twice the data throughput compared to Gen2.

“A key new thing we have added to the T130 is our full remote management solution from our higher end servers,” Payne said. “It’s important for people buying multiples of these, and it’s important for VARs because it lets them service customers remotely. It’s a critical improvement in this product class.”

The T330 is targeted at small business, and departments and ROBO [Remote Office/Branch Office of large institutions. It has the same set of enhancements, plus further improvements to provide room for growth.

“The critical improvement with the T330 is its ability to scale storage,” Payne said. “The hot pluggable drives have had more capacity added, and it also has the ability to rack the server as the business grows.” Its upgraded RAID controller can also double IO performance relative to the prior generation.

The two new 1U rack servers are the R230, which replaces the R220, and the R330, which replaces the R320. Both have the same technical advancements as the power servers.

“The difference between them is availability and storage expansion,” Payne said. “The R230 is targeted at providing the most cost-effective compute in a dense form factor. It is aimed at the core SMB market, but beyond that we see two additional markets. One is in the hosting space, as this is the cost effective way for a hoster to provide a dedicated server because of the dense form factor. The other is OEMs.” It is also expected to attract attention as a dedicated development server.

The R330 has enhanced expandability and availability to both the R230 and the R320 it replaces. It is targeted at SMB and ROBO rack environments. It also offers a choice of 2.5” or 3.5” HDD, plus an option for additional 2 x 1.8” SSD for a fast boot.

All the new 1U servers are shipping now. Pricing has not yet been determined.