After talking to several folks here at Dell, I can say that we have a lot of folks who are excited to bring the PowerEdge M-Series modular blade servers to market, along with a new 10U enclosure. Building on the PowerEdge 1955 blade system that InfoWorld recently named Best Blade Server System of the Year, Dell focused much attention on energy efficiency, I/O flexibility and usability in designing the new M-Series system.
The 10U PowerEdge M1000e enclosure supports up to 16 PowerEdge M600 or M605 blade servers that offer two quad-core Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron processors per blade. We improved power and cooling by starting with our Energy Smart technologies, using high efficient fans and power supplies, and through Dynamic Power Management—which allows customers to use software to dynamically load balance across power supplies, or to even turn off power supplies when they're not needed. Flexibility is also key, and the M-Series has been designed to support snap-in capability all the way down to the switch interconnects. The PowerEdge M1000e also offers all kinds of connectivity options—including the upgradable Dell PowerConnect M6220 Layer 3 switch, three different Cisco switch options, two 4Gb Fibre Chanel switch options from Brocade, Fibre Channel host bus adapters from QLogic and Emulex, and more.
These blade servers are ideal for medium and large size customers who are faced with space constraints, power and cooling challenges, and the need to scale their environment quickly wihout sacrificing ease of deployment.
In this vlog, I talked to Chad Fenner from the PowerEdge server team. He covers quite a bit here… providing insight into the development process, usability enhancements, more details on energy efficiency, ease of use, connectivity and flexibility and more.
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Folks on the development team told me that lots of customer feedback they gathered during the 2-year development cycle helped shape this product. Like I mention in the video, there's many different topics to cover with a product like this.
We look forward to your comments—please let us know what areas you want to discuss in more detail and we'll go from there.