The enhancements reflect the increased capacity of Intel’s new Xeon E7 and E5 v4 processor. Dell has also refreshed its PowerEdge R830 rack server, which had not been updated since 2011.
Brian Payne, Executive Director, Server Platform Management and Strategy at Dell
Today, in co-ordination with Intel’s announcement of its new Broadwell server CPUs, Dell is announcing updates to its PowerEdge 13th generation four-socket server portfolio., in which they are emphasizing that the importance of their announcement relates to the comprehensive nature of the upgrades.
“This is Dell’s most comprehensive four-socket portfolio, and it is important to think of these in the context of a full four-socket portfolio,” said Brian Payne, Executive Director, Server Platform Management and Strategy at Dell.
The PowerEdge R930, Dell’s most powerful four-socket server, which is optimized for memory-intensive database application workloads, gets a boost from the new CPUs. While the other three servers are designed around the new Intel Xeon E5 v4 chip, the R930 is designed around the Intel Xeon E7 processor.
“We expect to see improvements in the mid to low 20 per cent range in the new R930,” Payne said.
These numbers were reflected in Dell’s announcement that the new PowerEdge R930 had set three new world record benchmarks on SAP. This includes a record on the standard benchmark for the SAP HANA platform with 2 billion records, which represents a 24.77 per cent improvement over the old 4-socket world record, and a 23.06 per cent improvement on the HANA platform with 4 billion records. The old records on both had been set on a PowerEdge R930 with E7v3 processors, so the increase reflects the jump from the E7v3 to the E7v4.
The PowerEdge R830 is a revival of an older Dell product. It is a mid-market focused 2U rack server used for databases, scale-out virtualization, and VDI. It, and all the other new servers except the R 930, use Intel E5-4600 v4 processors.
“We introduced this product category back in 2011, and are now reintroducing it,” Payne said. “We didn’t release a new version with the Haswell chips, but are now bringing it back. It offers a strong combination of density and the simplicity of a rack server design.”
The refreshed PowerEdge FC830 is a converged 2U server for the PowerEdge FX architecture which combines modular server, storage and networking blocks and has twice the density of any available four-socket solution.
“It provides top end performance for greater database scalability, is positioned for customers who want leading density for converged infrastructures,” Payne said.
Finally, the new version of the M830 refreshes the full-height blade server Dell introduced last year.
Payne said that, as is customary, Dell will wind down selling the existing CPU families over the next couple quarters.
These servers are all solid channel products, even the R930, said Ravi Pendekanti Dell’s Vice President of Server Product Management and Product Marketing.
“We have at least two customers who are looking at using an SI for these, because they have a mix of data types and are looking for someone to normalize all the metadata,” he said. “We are getting a good number of global SIs to come on board.”
The PowerEdge R930, 4S/4U rack server is available now. The other three servers, the PowerEdge R830 rack server and PowerEdge FC830 and M830 blade servers will be available later in June, when the Intel Xeon E5-4600 v4 processor hits the market.
