Dell EMC Advances World's Top-Selling Server Portfolio

HOPKINTON, Mass., April 2, 2019 /PRNewswire/ --

News summary

• Dell EMC OpenManage and iDRAC systems management enhancements deliver greater control, automation and security features for PowerEdge servers
• Highest performing PowerEdge servers to date offer increased performance for workloads of all types from everyday computing to data-hungry analytics
• Adoption of 2^nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory accelerates in-memory databases, virtualization and data analytics workloads with up to 2.7 times more transactions per second¹

Full story
Dell EMC today announces several advancements to Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, the world's top selling server portfolio², offering improved management, security, performance and scalability for customers' everyday and most demanding workloads. These advancements to PowerEdge servers and OpenManage systems management further enable a secure, scalable compute platform as the ideal foundation for cloud, analytics and software-defined data center initiatives.

"As organizations rapidly keep pace with growing sets of information and data, they're also adopting more advanced applications to generate greater insights with digital transformation efforts," said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, president, Server and Infrastructure Systems, Dell EMC. "Making the industry-leading PowerEdge server portfolio even stronger, we are enabling our customers to benefit from additional automation, control and security with more responsive and powerful systems."

According to IDC's latest research, Dell EMC continued to be No. 1 in both x86 server revenue and units shipped globally in an industry that saw its greatest demand ever during 2018. The analyst firm's research found worldwide server vendor revenues increased 12.6% year-over-year to $23.6 billion, during the fourth quarter of 2018, marking the fifth consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth and the all-time high for total revenue in any quarter ever. For x86 servers, Dell EMC has held or shared the No. 1 position for revenue for six consecutive quarters and for units shipped for over the past two years.²

Dell EMC offers advanced infrastructure to tackle for more advanced workloads

Dell EMC PowerEdge servers deliver an automated, secure and scalable platform, allowing businesses to balance operational efficiency and strategic initiatives. This supports organizations tasked with driving higher engagement with customers and meeting strict SLAs while adopting new workloads and meeting new business objectives.

Advancements to Dell EMC PowerEdge and Dell EMC OpenManage systems management offer customers more control to manage their server infrastructure and to mitigate threats, backed by a new boost in performance and scalability. Among the new features, the introduction of OpenManage FlexSelect Manage and FlexSelect Secure provides improved flexibility for managing and securing PowerEdge systems. Customers can expect to gain several new benefits and capabilities:

Greater Control

• Launch of the FlexSelect Manage architecture offers customers new flexibility to choose among specific OpenManage Enterprise capabilities. Delivered first by an innovative power management plug-in, this reduces the number of consoles necessary to match users' own specific needs and further streamline management efficiency.
• New enhancements to the Redfish-compliant Dell EMC RESTful API for control of even more server operations and devices including new flexibility to manage servers directly from an operating system in addition to a typical management network. This enables users to more easily integrate PowerEdge servers into their existing processes for a more consistent server management experience.
• New augmented reality on OpenManage Mobile offers customers a graphical representation of exactly where incidents occur within their environment to accurately identify target areas in their PowerEdge MX infrastructure and help speed resolution—from any mobile device. Customers can reduce time to maintain server health by 28%, through fewer steps, compared to manually retrieving server logs.
• Through Dell EMC and Intel close collaboration, PowerEdge servers can discover, monitor, configure and update supported Intel Optane DC persistent memory and Intel Optane DC SSDs with OpenManage agent-free management. This enables customers to save time by automating configuration of BIOS, drives and memory. Through auto-discovery, these configurations can be replicated across multiple servers without further manual intervention, freeing up IT staff from manual tasks, so they can focus on more strategic work.

Enhanced Security

• Scale data protection and streamline management of self-encrypting drives with new OpenManage Secure Enterprise Key Manager. This enables customers to centrally manage keys for self-encrypting drives to better secure data at both the drive and server level.
• New OpenManage FlexSelect Secure capability gives customers the flexibility to adapt and scale their security solutions to meet their own business requirements. For example, new security and encryption options added to the integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) offer flexibility to allow communications among server components and outside connectivity based on one's own security policies.

Improved Performance and Scalability

• With new 2^nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, PowerEdge customers can better drive their digital transformations with improved performance. PowerEdge servers with these new processors offer up to a 40% increase in performance for core business applications, helping to improve organizations' overall internal and external customer experiences.³ Easy BIOS tuning with workload-optimized server configuration profiles allow customers to configure optimal performance as they add new technologies or workloads.
• According to a new benchmark, a single Dell EMC PowerEdge R940 server with 2^nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors can successfully host 69,500 simultaneous users within the SAP Sales & Distribution Standard Application Benchmark. This demonstrates up to a 60% increase in supported users from a single server compared to the PowerEdge R930 server.⁴
• With new Intel Optane DC persistent memory, customers can accelerate in-memory databases, virtualization and data analytics workloads with up to 2.5 times more memory capacity for select PowerEdge Servers.⁵ The PowerEdge R740xd enables up to 2.7 times the transactions per second with an Intel Optane DC persistent memory compared to NVMe drives in a virtualized Microsoft SQL Server 2019 preview environment with VMware ESXi.¹
• Dell EMC Ready Solutions enable customers to drive insights faster for high performance computing and artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and, with the new Intel® Deep Learning Boost, make it easier for customers to tackle parallel use cases, such as deep learning, offering nearly three times faster inferencing performance in deep neural networks.⁶

These new features are enabled and supported by Dell EMC OpenManage systems management portfolio, which removes complexity, allowing customers to effortlessly manage their infrastructure. Additionally, the iDRAC is a foundational element of the PowerEdge portfolio that enables automation of server deployment, configuration, updates and maintenance procedures.

Availability

• Dell EMC OpenManage updates will be generally available across the PowerEdge portfolio throughout the second quarter of 2019.
• Dell EMC PowerEdge R940, R740, R740xd, R740xd2, R640, and C6420 servers with 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors have planned global availability on April 16, 2019. Additional PowerEdge servers, including those for PowerEdge MX, will be globally available with the processor upgrade in the second quarter of 2019.
• Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory will be available for hands-on trials through a Dell EMC customer proof of concept program and through Dell Technologies Customer Solution Centers beginning this April and generally available globally later in the second quarter of 2019 on select two- and four-socket PowerEdge servers.
• Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC with Intel Deep Learning Boost will be globally available on April 23, 2019.
• These updated PowerEdge servers will become available as the foundation for Dell EMC Ready Solutions and the Dell EMC hyperconverged infrastructure portfolio in 2019.

Additional resources

• Dell EMC PowerEdge servers
• Direct2Dell EMC Blog: Drive everyday workloads today and be ready to innovate tomorrow
• Follow the latest news on Twitter from @DellEMC and @DellEMCServers.

Supporting quotes

Troy Crabtree, executive vice president, operations, Cybera
"We run a demanding cloud-based managed application network where performance is critical. With 90,000 access points and the largest SD-WAN network globally, Cybera customers are accessing our application network any time of the day, all across the world, to successfully run their businesses. We are able to meet high performance demands and continually add new services by using Dell EMC PowerEdge servers as the foundation for our scalable, secure and reliable multi-cloud services platform. The improved performance of our PowerEdge infrastructure with 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors will enable us to accelerate our response times and continue to exceed our customers' expectations."

Tim Grieser, vice president, system management software, IDC Research
"We are seeing the IT system and service management software market growing more than 7% through 2023. This is driven by a need to automate and manage greater efficiency across increasingly complex on-premises, private cloud, public cloud and multi-cloud environments. We're seeing Dell Technologies refining its OpenManage suite of capabilities to deliver a robust management platform for these more modern, dynamic IT infrastructures."

About Dell EMC
Dell EMC, a part of Dell Technologies, enables organizations to modernize, automate and transform their data center using industry-leading converged infrastructure, servers, storage and data protection technologies. This provides a trusted foundation for businesses to transform IT, through the creation of a hybrid cloud, and transform their business through the creation of cloud-native applications and big data solutions.  Dell EMC services customers across 180 countries – including 99% of the Fortune 500 – with the industry's most comprehensive and innovative portfolio from edge to core to cloud.

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Copyright © 2019. All Rights Reserved. Dell, Dell EMC, Dell Technologies and the Dell Technologies logo are trademarks of Dell Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

¹Based on Dell EMC internal testing in March 2019 comparing a PowerEdge R740xd with 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and 2 x 1.6TB Mixed Use NVMes using Microsoft SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.3, VMware ESXi 6.7U1 and a RHEL 7.6GA vs the same R740xd configuration except for substituting the NVMes for 12 x 256GB DIMMs of Intel OptaneDC Persistent Memory. Workload used is derived from TPC-C to SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.3 performance. The results obtained with the derived workload are not comparable to published TPC-C results. Actual results will vary. 

² Source: IDC Quarterly Server Tracker, Q4 2018.

³ Preliminary results based on Dell EMC internal testing comparing a PowerEdge R740 with Intel Xeon Scalable processors (first generation) Silver 4116 vs. a PowerEdge R740 with 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors Silver 4216 running SPECcpu2017 int_rate_base, February 2019. Actual results will vary.

⁴ Results of the Dell EMC PowerEdge R940 on the two-tier SAP SD standard application benchmark 69,500 Users; Average dialog response time: 0.97 seconds.  Throughput: Fully processed order line items per hour 7,600,330, Dialog steps per hour: 22.801.000, SAPS: 380,020.  SAP benchmark with enhancement package 5 for SAP ERP 6.0, SAP ASE 16; SLES15; with 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 CPUs (4 CPUs, 112 cores and 224 threads) and 1536GB of memory. Certification number: 2019023. Results as of March 2019. Comparison is to a similarly equipped PowerEdge R930 server, 43,300 Users; Average dialog response time: 0.98 seconds.  Throughput: Fully processed order line items per hour 4,730,330, Dialog steps per hour: 14,191,000, SAPS: 236,520.: SAP benchmark with enhancement package 5 for SAP ERP 6.0, SAP ASE 16; RHEL 7.2; with Intel Xeon processor E7-8894 v4 CPUs (4 CPUs, 96 cores and 192 threads) and 1024GB of memory. Certification number: #2017001 from 2017-02-06. Details regarding this benchmark are available upon request from hardware partner or SAP AG.

⁵ Based on Dell internal analysis, comparing select PowerEdge servers using Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory DIMMs and/or DRAM DIMMs vs just using DRAM DIMMs, January 2019.

⁶ Based on Dell EMC internal testing, March 2019, using INT8 benchmark for image classification with ResNet50 comparing Intel® Xeon® Scalable Gold 6148 vs Intel® Xeon® Scalable Gold 6248 processors on a two-socket Dell EMC PowerEdge C6420. Actual results will vary.

SOURCE Dell EMC

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