Dell Revamps PowerEdge Server Range With Intel Grantley Chips

Dell has launched additions to its server range running the latest generation of Intel’s Xeon E5-2600 server chips, announced at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco on Monday, taking the refresh as an opportunity to bring in improvements in areas including automation and management.

The new Xeon, code-named ‘Grantley’, is based on Intel’s Haswell architecture, which the company says offers significantly better application performance and power efficiency. HP, Cisco, Lenovo and others are also launching systems based on the chip.

Flexibility

Dell said it has re-engineered its PowerEdge systems to help users adapt to the increasingly rapid pace of change in IT. The systems can help customers “bridge between traditional and new IT models so they are always prepared to incorporate new innovations and stand up and optimise new applications within their data centres,” according to Dell vice president Forrest Norrod.

The company’s 13th-generation PowerEdge servers arrive in rack, blade and tower forms, and use 1.8-inch SSDs to increase density, improve performance and complement the use of DDR4 RAM.

The PowerEdge 730xd, a 2U rack-mount system, implements tiered storage using NVMe Express Flash attached directly to the PCI Express bus and controlled by Dell’s Fluid Cache for SAN software. This storage-focused device can hold up to 100TB of storage internally, Dell said. The company also introduced R730 and R630 rack-mount systems.

The T630 tower can be configured with four GPU adapter cards, making it well-suited to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments, while the M630 1U two-socket blade is designed for dense environments.

The servers feature Dell’s Zero-Touch Repository Manager for automated deployment, and allow administrators to access status information and configure systems on the spot using Near Field Communication (NFC)-enabled mobile devices.

The Zero-Touch feature uses Dell’s Remote Access Controller (iDrac) technology, built into all PowerEdge servers, allowing automatic configuration via XML-formatted data supplied on a USB stick. All of the new systems reduce boot times by 45 percent over the previous generation, Dell said.

The systems are available to order immediately.

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