Dell EMC also previewed their new PowerEdge MX servers – again – due for release some time in the back half of the year.

LAS VEGAS – At Dell Technologies World here, Dell EMC made a pair of announcements around their server portfolio. They announced their latest 14th generation PowerEdge servers, new four socket machines with new artificial intelligence.

“Artificial intelligence is the latest buzz in our industry and it’s easy to see why,” said Jeff Clarke, Dell’s Vice Chairman of Products and Operations, in the Tuesday morning keynote. You can make use of all the data to drive better business outcomes. Clarke reviewed how Dell has been using AI in various aspects of their operations, from machine learning in our supply chain, to predict outcomes in their ProDeploy support packages, making them much more efficient. He then turned to the use of AI in their new four socket servers – the PowerEdge R940xa and PowerEdge R840

“These are purpose built to power real-time data analytics for machine learning and artificial intelligence workloads,” Clarke said. “They are bar none the fastest and most intelligent servers on the planet, and just set a new record for the SAP Linux benchmark. Faster analytics means faster business outcomes which means faster business results and that’s exactly what these two products do – turn that data into information so you can drive better outcomes.”

“Customers want a better way to deal with analytics,” said Ravi Pendekanti, SVP, product management and marketing, Server and Infrastructure Systems, at Dell EMC. “Customers told us that nearly 46 per cent use Big Data as a key driver, and that security is a key challenge for 66 per cent.”

Pendekanti also stressed that servers have to be able to deliver custom performance.

“The concept of general purpose servers across different workloads doesn’t give the custom performance that customers need,” he said. He stressed that they are mow able to reach extreme acceleration points, which is what they have brought in the PowerEdge R940xa – with the x standing for Extreme Intelligence.

“Even the R840 supports up to 24 NVMe drives – 2x the competition, so their response time is 3.5x faster,” Pendekanti said. “The R940 has a 1-1 ratio between CPU and GPU. This server will also support up to 8 FPGAs which are becoming very important in this segment.”

Pedekanti also highlighted what he termed these servers’ cyberresilient architecture, which is integrated all through the structure, as well as the RESTful APIs with Redfish for better management structure and improved developer efficiency.

Both of these servers will be available in Q2.

Dell EMC also highlighted a ‘coming attraction’ which will not be available until the second half of the year – the PowerEdge MX and its new modular infrastructure. They earlier previewed this in January as a teaser, and now provided a little more information – but not very much.

“The focus of this will be on kinetic infrastructure, which will give customers the ability to independently vector things out,” Pendekanti said. “That’s  where modular infrastructure is important. It eliminates bottlenecks.”

The concept certainly intrigued customers as they filed out of the keynote. Several were grumbling, however, that the ‘sneak peek’ was too bereft of detail, and that they wanted to know more about it. Hopefully, Dell EMC will move to address that issue as soon as possible.