Perhaps you have already seen the reaction to our February announcement of our PowerEdge 12thgeneration servers: 18 excellent product reviews in the press, with one of our servers, the R720, being chosen by Byte TI as the “Best Server of 2012”. Reading the reviews, it is clear that the evaluators understood that the innovations designed into the systems weren’t just “cool” technology, or just technologies ahead of the competition. The technologies are cool, and they are ahead of the competition, but beyond that what the reviewers saw was that the innovations mapped to real world issues that users are striving to overcome, and that the new capabilities lead to meaningful results.
Mapping to real world usage, and enabling users to deliver meaningful results, are two crucially important criteria on the part of potential customers. That we succeeded in hitting the mark on both of these is underscored by feedback we received by customers:
By enabling us to run a large number of virtual machines on each physical host, the Dell PowerEdge R720 server with the Intel Xeon processor E5 family will have a direct and positive impact on our bottom line.”
-Alex Rodriguez, Vice President of Systems Engineering and Product Development, Expedient
The Dell PowerEdge R620 running the Intel Xeon processor E5 family cuts the time it takes to complete our calculations. This level of performance will make a huge difference to our research faculty and students.”
-Hervé Gilquin, Head of Department for Centralised Hardware Dedicated to Scientific Calculation, ENS Lyon
The iDRAC7 with Lifecycle Controller available with the Dell PowerEdge 12th generation servers will help ensure that HPC resources are available whenever users need them. We couldn’t run without iDRAC.”
-Erik Brown, System Administrator, Center for High-Performance Computing, University of Utah
How were we able to bring servers and solutions to market that are so closely attuned to customer requirements?
The answer to this lies in our differentiated approach to solutions design. We engaged deeply with customers during the early planning stages for the 12th generation servers. I’ve written before about how we had over 7,700 conversations with customers. These weren’t casual conversations about speeds and feeds, but deep engagements with customers, individually and in focus groups, in order to understand their real world usage, and what they needed future systems to do for them. This gave us insight into what customers required for their servers and their IT infrastructures, and we acted on what we learned.
After hearing from our customers, we used that feedback to engineer solutions that you will find across our PowerEdge 12th generation servers, including the new members that we are announcing this week. These new platforms help to address the requirements of users of all sizes, from small and medium businesses to the largest enterprises, with workloads ranging from the edge of the network all the way back into the data center.
Some of the innovations you heard about in February. These include capabilities such as protecting customers’ virtualized workloads with failsafe hypervisors, enabling servers to run in extended operating temperatures with Fresh Air, and helping customers save time and reduce potential for error with our industry-first agent-free systems management. We are implementing these and other capabilities into the newest members of the PowerEdge portfolio so our customers receive a consistent set of capabilities across our complete product line, regardless of which PowerEdge server they choose.
Other innovations are completely new with this launch. They include helping customers get better utilization out of their precious data center space, with no-compromise, highly dense solutions in racks and blades, unmatched in the industry.
A specific customer-designed example of the value and innovation in today’s announcement is the PowerEdge M420 which is a revolutionary quarter-height blade with complete enterprise-class features. Data centers can now, in the same 10U size M1000e blade chassis, double their performance capabilities with 32 servers while cutting their infrastructure costs in half. Combined with Dell’s Chassis Management Controller, system administrators can now simplify their environment by managing up to 288 nodes through one interface, using a single IP address. PowerEdge users will also be able to address their environmental challenges around server chassis depth, achieve superior acoustics for quiet office environments, and benefit from unprecedented enterprise-class performance and memory protection in our 1-socket servers.
You can learn more about the new PowerEdge servers and solutions here. Each platform reflects the results of deep engagement with customers and acting on what we learned. Or, in other words, “Designed by you. Engineered by Dell.”