After a sneak peak at Dell Technologies World in April, Dell EMC has opened the floodgates and announced a release date for its PowerEdge MX infrastructure.
Dell says the latest line of PowerEdge servers, launching Sept. 12, is designed for the software-defined data centre that boasts a kinetic infrastructure supporting multiple generations of technology releases, such as processors, storage types and connectivity innovations. During a briefing call with reporters, company reps described the upcoming launch as the most significant PowerEdge announcement this year.
The Dell EMC PowerEdge MX launches Sept. 12. Photo from Dell EMC.
“It’s a modular architecture that helps build a bridge between your traditional workloads and your transformational workloads,” explained Ravi Pendekanti, Dell EMC’s senior vice-president of product management and marketing for server and infrastructure systems.
In order to make this happen, the PowerEdge MX allows customers to customize it with a portfolio of components that include:
Dell EMC PowerEdge MX7000 chassis: Offers a hardware foundation with support for multiple server processor generations, in a scalable system with end-to-end lifecycle management and a single interface for all components, allowing organizations to focus more on their business priorities than IT maintenance. This 7U chassis includes eight bays to accommodate a variety of single- and double-width compute and storage combinations.
Dell EMC PowerEdge MX740c and MX840c compute sleds: The MX740 features two- and four-socket blade sleds. It also includes a variety of storage options including NVMe drives. The full-width MX740c and double-width MX840c support the full Intel Xeon Scalable Processor family with up to six terabytes of memory.
Dell EMC PowerEdge MX5016s storage sled: Dense, full-width, scale-out storage sleds complement MX servers, holding up to 16 hot-pluggable SAS storage hard disk drives, with a maximum of seven MX5016s sleds in the MX chassis for up to 112 drives of direct-attached storage. These drives can be individually mapped to one or more servers, offering the ideal storage ratio needed for specific use cases.
Dell EMC PowerEdge MX Ethernet and fibre channel switching modules: New low latency, high-bandwidth switching modules for multi-chassis environments include automated processes for topology compliance, quality of service and autonomous healing. Dell EMC says the PowerEdge MX is the industry’s first modular infrastructure to deliver end-to-end 25GbE and 32Gbps fibre channel host connectivity. Combined with 100GbE and 32G fibre channel uplinks, customers can expect up to a 55 per cent reduction in switching latency for highly-scalable, multi-chassis fabric architectures.
Brian Payne, vice-president of product management and marketing for Dell EMC PowerEdge, told reporters the company is seeing storage move closer to compute to support modern workloads, making a highly-customizable machine such as the latest PowerEdge the go-to option when it comes to preparing for the future.
“There are other offers in the marketplace today that have unique consoles for unique servers offers in the industry, and we’ve taken a differentiated position of providing one single solution that can work across all PowerEdge servers, greatly simplifying operations for our customers,” added Payne. “This is very important for addressing the customer needs for simplicity in managing their data centre environment.”