Do More with Less with the New 11th Generation PowerEdge Servers

Last week we announced our Efficient Enterprise portfolio of integrated products and services. This week we are revealing the details of our five new blade, rack and tower 11th generation Dell PowerEdge servers that are now available. These new servers were officially debuted at the Intel Xeon 5500 series processor launch event this afternoon in Santa Clara, California, and Intel’s Boyd Davis wrote about it earlier today on Direct2Dell.

Despite economic challenges, many companies and organizations want to take advantage of the significant performance increases paired with the cost savings from energy efficient technologies and virtualization. The majority of data centers were built during the dot-com boom and are reaching their 10-year lifespan, so it’s no surprise that many companies are in need of a refresh. Dell designed its new servers with input from hundreds of IT pros worldwide with a theme in mind: do more with less. The new server portfolio does that by simplifying data center operations, improving performance and energy efficiency, and lowering total cost of ownership.

Before we take a look under the hood, let’s check out the sleek design. Not only do these new servers look cool enough to be in Bruce Wayne’s lair in Batman “The Dark Knight,” but they have also won 2009 iF Germany Product Design Awards. It’s not just about good looks. The new servers have system and image commonality across platforms with logical layout of components and power supply placement allows for straight forward installation and redeployment.

What’s New Inside?

  • Simplify with the Industry’s First Embedded Systems Management: Dell put a lot of the systems management media you need for deployment, diagnostics, update, and configuration right on the motherboard. Unified Server Configurator powered by LifeCycle Controller radically simplifies IT processes so you can deploy operating systems 43 percent faster.
  • Save with Industry Leading Energy Efficiency: Energy Smart technologies in the new servers cut power usage while cranking up performance capacity. We expect Dell PowerEdge 11th generation servers to have the industry’s highest performance per watt, according to SPECpower_ssj2008 results to be published later today.
  • Do More with Leading Virtualization Performance: In addition to the new Intel Xeon 5500 series processors, the PowerEdge servers have embedded hypervisors from VMware, Citrix and Microsoft, up to 125 percent increased memory footprint and more integrated I/O. All of that emphasis on virtualization paid off. Dell PowerEdge R710 achieved the industry’s highest VMmark score for 2U servers, topping all 2- and 4-socket platforms in virtualization performance.
  • More Horsepower to Do More: the new servers provide up to 50 percent more performance over previous generation servers to run those massive databases and applications more efficiently. According to SPECjbb2005 Dell PowerEdge servers lead the industry in performance.

We’re excited by this major refresh of our server portfolio and by what it can do to advance IT for our customers. If you want the details on how you can do more with less in your data center with the new 11th Generation Dell PowerEdge servers, check out our benchmarks.

About the Author: Matt McGinnis