At the official Canadian launch event last night, Dell Inc. officially showed off its PowerEdge FX2 line of converged infrastructure, with the company saying it has already sold some 1,000 units in North America since it started shipping last week, according to company executives.
First announced at this year’s Dell World, the FX2 offers blade-based architecture in a 2U rack compute and storage server form factor, and is the first of its kind even from Dell, according to Brian Payne, executive director of corporate solutions for Dell’s PowerEdge portfolio.
“How can I get the benefits of modularity that were valued by the blade customers, the benefits of scalability and density that were valued by the hyperscale, and then the benefit of platform extension growth valued by the rack customers and also bring in the disruptive forces happening in the market … and deliver it into a new platform architecture?” Payne said to a room that primarily consisted of Dell customers. “It’s a new architecture that is different than anything that’s out there today.”
Compared to other products in the market such as the recently announced VersaStack from IBM and Cisco, the FX would provide more of a “building block” for a converged system platform, and offer I/O aggregation at the server level and reduced latency by managing “east-west traffic” within the chassis. Meanwhile, compared to HP’s Moonshot system, the FX would offer scalable storage and more compute options than microservers, Payne said.
Keeping in mind that transitioning to virtualization does not happen in businesses overnight, Payne added that the FX architecture aims to support both traditional IT and new emerging models.
While Payne would not comment on the margins that partners might see, he said that the FX would not change Dell’s approach to the channel.
“The new IT models are starting to meld and make their way into the mainstream enterprise,” Payne said. “We’ve gotta play in both the new IT and the traditional IT area and help customers with their problems.”
