Dell Blades Slash Data Center Power Consumption

ROUND ROCK, Texas--(EON:Enhanced Online News)--Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) today set a new standard for data center energy efficiency and flexibility with the PowerEdge™ M-Series blade solution. The PowerEdge M-Series was designed from the ground up using Dell Energy Smart technologies, resulting in 30 industry patents, to help customers simplify information technology and better address mounting environmental challenges in their data centers. The new M1000e blade enclosure is now available worldwide for ordering with a starting price of $5,999, along with blades starting at $1,849. For more information, visit www.dell.com/poweredge.

“Blade offerings have been long on promises and short on helping customers address the growing costs and complexity in their data centers”

The PowerEdge M-Series consumes up to 19 percent less power and achieves up to 25 percent better performance per watt than the HP BladeSystem c-Class¹. Compared to the IBM BladeCenter H, the M-Series consumes 12 percent less energy and achieves up to 28 percent better performance per watt¹. Built on Dell’s Energy Smart technologies, the PowerEdge M-Series enables businesses to save on power and cooling costs while increasing server capacity. The M-Series also provides lead-free configurations, delivering a “green IT” solution that further helps customers minimize their environmental impact.

“Blade offerings have been long on promises and short on helping customers address the growing costs and complexity in their data centers,” said Brad Anderson, senior vice president, Dell Business Product Group. “The PowerEdge M-Series delivers on those promises with unmatched energy efficiency, flexibility, performance and manageability. It enables customers to achieve the compute performance they need while lowering their overall power consumption and reducing data center complexity and server sprawl.”

The PowerEdge M1000e, a 10U-sized enclosure, supports 16 blade servers. It is optimized for Dell’s PowerEdge M600 and M605 blade servers and supports up to two quad-core Intel^® Xeon^® and quad-core AMD Opteron™ processors, respectively. The M600 and M605 blade servers are 60 percent more dense than standard 1U servers, helping customers to better address data center space constraints.

Additionally, Dell’s PowerEdge M1000e delivers the industry's most advanced connectivity options designed to provide flexible, low total cost of ownership choices for almost any size data center, including:

• An upgradeable Ethernet blade switch, the Layer 3 Dell PowerConnect M6220, with four 1Gb ports and optional upgradeable ports for stacking or 10Gb;
• Three Cisco Ethernet switch options, enabling customers to choose between a switch with all 1Gb ports, 1Gb ports plus stacking ports or a combination of 1Gb and 10Gb plus stacking. An Infiniband switch option from Cisco also will be available;
• Two Brocade 4Gb Fibre Channel connectivity options, allowing customers to choose between a standard FC4 switch or a low-cost port aggregator that provides simplified configuration and interoperability into almost any SAN fabric;
• FC4 Host Bus Adaptors from QLogic and Emulex, as well as an Infiniband mezzanine card from Mellanox; and
• Fibre Channel and Ethernet Pass Through options for customers with an existing switch infrastructure, including an Ethernet pass through module that can run at 10/100/1,000Mb per second.

Increased Flexibility and Investment Protection – Ideal Platform for Virtualization

Dell’s PowerEdge M-Series incorporates FlexIO switch technology, making it the only blade solution providing snap-in scalability all the way down to the switch interconnects, helping to protect and maximize a customer’s server investment by eliminating the need for wasteful “rip-and-replace” upgrades. With FlexIO switch technology, M-Series customers get the flexibility they need to efficiently design a networked blade environment that best meets their infrastructure requirements today, and easily and cost effectively add or modify network stacking and uplink capabilities as technology or business needs change.

Dell PowerEdge M-Series is the ideal platform for virtualization and enables customers to consolidate their data center operations and improve utilization without sacrificing performance. The ability to provision virtual machines and physical machines in the same blade server chassis simplifies deployment and management of a virtualized environment.

Simplified Management

Dell’s OpenManage™ systems management suite available with the PowerEdge M-Series simplifies IT with easy-to-use yet powerful management tools that help reduce the cost and complexity of managing computing resources. OpenManage provides customers with a more holistic view and greater understanding of their data center infrastructures, enabling timely, more informed IT management decisions.

Dell provides expanded management features in the M-Series at no additional cost, including:

• Centralized chassis management controllers that provide redundant, secure access paths for IT administrators to manage multiple enclosures and blades from a single console;
• Dynamic power management enabling administrators to set high/low power thresholds to help ensure blades operate within their defined power envelope;
• Real-time reporting for enclosure and blade power consumption, and the ability to prioritize blade slots for power to provide optimal control over power resources; and
• Integrated KVM (keyboard/video/mouse), allowing for easy setup, deployment and seamless integration into an existing KVM infrastructure.

About Dell

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ:DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services they trust and value. Uniquely enabled by its direct business model, Dell is a leading global systems and services company and No. 34 on the Fortune 500. For more information, visit www.dell.com, or to communicate directly with Dell via a variety of online channels, go to www.dell.com/conversations. To get Dell news direct, visit www.dell.com/RSS.

¹ Based on Principled Technologies’ “SPECjbb2005 performance and power consumption on Dell, HP, and IBM blade servers” December 2007 test report commissioned by Dell.

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