The dominant theme of this year’s Dell EMC World is the automation of the data centre, and a key part of that is the announcement of its latest servers, with availability set for summer.
LAS VEGAS – Dell EMC kicked off its customer event here with the announcement of the forthcoming availability of the 14th generation of their PowerEdge servers. They will be available around mid-year – just as soon as Intel makes the new processors available. The company stressed, however, that the new servers are about much more than the processors.
“The big news of today is the launch of our next generation of PowerEdge servers,” said David Goulden, Dell EMC’s president, in the opening keynote. “The new release is jam-packed with amazing technologies – and they also look very cool from the outside.
“These are very advanced devices and there’s a lot of innovation in them, and we are early to market with the new Intel technology,” Goulden stated. “The innovation in 14G is huge.”
Dell EMC is emphasizing three distinct areas of innovation. First is the scalable nature of the business architecture, designed to be able to handle mission-critical workload requirements.
“Scalability is always a major factor, and with this generation, we can get up to 50 per cent more users per server,” Goulden said.
“Our customers told us that they were getting left behind by the pace of change,” said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, Dell EMC’s President, Server Solutions. “We knew we had to reduce the latency, so we added 19 times more NDME flash to make sure that happens.” One-click BIOS tuning also now enables quick-and-easy deployment of many processing-intensive workloads.
“It’s always a big deal when new servers are announced,” said Jeremy Burton, Dell Technologies’ Chief Marketing Officer. “The 14th generation doesn’t just have the latest version of the Intel processor. A lot of work has gone into the software side of the house.”
The new automation features are key part of this, and several new features automate productivity and simplify lifecycle management.
“We set the bar in previous generations of servers on automation and systems management,” Gorakhpurwalla said. “We reduced 99 per cent of the steps needed to deploy a server, so you can deploy your resources elsewhere.”
ProSupportPlus with SupportAssist on these servers greatly speeds up time to fix problems.
“We can remediate server issues 90 per cent faster,” Goulden said.
The company says that the enhanced iDRAC 9 in these servers provides up to four times better systems management performance compared to the prior generation. Server management has also been enhanced with OpenManage Enterprise for datacentre monitoriong. It is a system management console with application plug-ins, an easy-to-use interface and customizable reporting
“We also made a breakthrough in multi-vector cooling, which now lets us support 50 per cent more GPUs than before,” Gorakhpurwalla said.
Goulden described the security features in these servers as taking an end-to-end approach. One new innovation is System Lockdown, which prevents unauthorized or inadvertent configuration changes that create security vulnerabilities. It complements existing features like Secure Boot, System Erase, Dell’s BIOS Recovery capabilities, signed firmware and iDRAC RESTful API.
None of this will be available, beyond the early access customers, until Intel delivers the new processors however.
“This is our 14th generation of servers, but it is our first generation as Dell EMC,” Gorakhphurwalla said. “The early customers who have them today are raving for more. Our message is ‘be patient. They are coming this summer.’ As soon as Intel announces the new Xeons, we will be there that day.”
