Get Ship Shape with The PowerEdge XR2 at SMM 2018

Are you creating solutions for the maritime or offshore industry outside of the traditional data centre? Do you need to comply with industry-specific certifications, such as Marine IEC60945 or DNV GL standards?

Do your customers need to access applications and data anytime, anywhere? Maybe your solutions are operating in the ship’s engine room with the challenge of limited space, oily conditions and extreme temperatures? Perhaps, you’re running naval surveillance operations while having to contend with vibrations caused by waves and high winds?

The PowerEdge XR2 has earned its sea legs

If you said yes to any of these questions, you’ll most definitely be interested in the latest marine-certified addition to the Dell EMC OEM PowerEdge family – the XR2, which offers industry-first security features and enhanced systems management.

Part of our latest family of 14th generation servers, the good news is that the rugged XR2 has now earned its sea legs with flying colours. You’ll be pleased to hear that multiple configurations have been extensively tested to meet exacting IEC60945 standards and are fully certified for DNV GL.

The whole nine yards

Some people may wonder, why do you need a server at sea? The answer is simple. Without a server, you have no way of filtering data, making calculations on the fly, or conducting analytics at the edge. Everything must go back to the data centre, resulting in delays, possible security concerns and negative impact to cost, bandwidth, latency and storage. The good news is that in all these scenarios, the XR2 rises beautifully to the challenge.

Light, tough and resistant

This little beauty measures just 52.5 cm (20.67 inches) rack depth and is lightweight at a maximum weight of 13kg (28lbs) so it can certainly fit in close quarters, where there’s no room to swing the proverbial cat. This is ideal for naval vessels, like patrol boats, multi-purpose frigates and amphibious ships, where you can’t use a standard-sized server due to space limitations or tough conditions, but you still need reliability and a lot of compute power, close to the action.

No need to batten down the hatches

The XR2 is resistant to shock and vibration as well as being capable of operating in temperatures of up to 45 degrees C° (113F°). In fact, this little toughie can tolerate 55 degrees C° for up to eight hours. It also has optional, rugged sliding rails for installation in standard four-post racks or in transit cases.

Running a tight ship

In addition to the standard PowerEdge security features, a common access card reader on the XR2 provides additional authentication. All you need do is simply remove the common access card reader and the server is immediately rendered useless with all the data automatically encrypted. As the saying goes, a picture paints a thousand words so let’s look at a couple of real-world examples.

Plain sailing

One customer offers a VoIP-based switching solution for naval communication, delivering future-ready voice and data communications. In this instance, all of the switching functions are implemented in software, hosted on the Dell EMC PowerEdge XR2 and Dell EMC Storage Virtual Rack MD3 OEM platforms.

In another use case, an energy services company built a satellite communications solution for drilling firms in remote harsh environments. The PowerEdge was chosen to cope with severe environmental requirements with the customer saying that it provided ‘outstanding quality’ in the field. Prior to choosing Dell EMC, the energy services supplier’s solution was with a white box provider that had suffered outages because of jarring transportation, dust and extreme temperatures.

Take it all on board

The bottom line is that when your customers build solutions for extreme or non-traditional environments, the onus is on you to deliver. Working with us, you can create connected, secure, rugged maritime solutions that can withstand extreme heat or cold, oil and dust plus the shock and vibration of ship’s engine rooms and other challenging environments.

I believe that the marine-grade PowerEdge XR2 is the perfect building block for your rugged OEM maritime solutions, and would love to hear your reactions and questions.

Come meet the Dell EMC OEM Crew and experience the PowerEdge XR2 at SMM Hamburg, 4-7 September, Admiral’s Club Lounge, Hall B4.

To learn more about Dell EMC OEM, visit: www.dellemc.com/oem

Visit DellEMC.COM/XR2 for all the latest XR2 product information.

Keep in touch. Follow us on Twitter @etienne_mary and @DellEMCOEM, and join our LinkedIn OEM & IoT Solutions Showcase page here.

About the Author: Mary Etienne

A business and technology leader with over 30-years’ IT industry experience in senior sales and management roles with Fortune 500 companies, Mary Etienne is Business Development Director at Dell EMC OEM where she leads the marine industries vertical. Enabling the industry with transformational technology and compute platforms continues to be one of Dell EMC OEM’s most exciting journeys as big data, sensors and communication, artificial intelligence, M2M, deep learning, the industrial Internet of Things and cloud technologies propel the industry into its “Marine 4.0” digital future. Our heritage, scale and marine-ready IT infrastructure have made Dell EMC the marine industry’s most complete technology provider across the entire value chain for enabling tomorrow’s smart ships, offshore oil & gas installations, renewable energy structures and the operational and services infrastructures supporting the entire ecosystem. Dell OEM Solutions and our partners help companies speed time to market and evolve their business model by simplifying today’s complex, connected world addressing trends like the Internet of Things, mobility, cloud, security and data analytics.