Dell Technologies Expands PowerEdge Servers and OpenManage Portfolios 

Oct. 6, 2020 — Today Dell Technologies announced expansions to its purpose-built PowerEdge XE family, as well as new and enhanced intelligent systems management tools – to provide the performance needed for data-centric applications and to help customers streamline routine tasks.

Designed to help customers with their digital transformations and become engines of innovation, Dell Technologies new offerings include:

• Dell EMC PowerEdge XE7100: The industry’s highest storage density 5U server helps customers bridge the collaboration gap, store data more securely and accelerate insights from data-centric workloads
• FlexSelect OpenManage Enterprise Plugin: Automates and simplifies server lifecycle tasks to scale operations rapidly
• OpenManage Enterprise SupportAssist: Prevents downtime through intelligent analytics, predictive alerts and automatically-generated support tickets
• OpenManage Enterprise Update Manager: Streamlines and automates the catalog and repositories to update tasks, checks for updates automatically, and stages and implements them during the next scheduled reboot

“New capabilities across the Dell EMC PowerEdge server and OpenManage solutions portfolio help empower enterprises to become innovation engines with scalable, connected and reliable infrastructure and tools. Additionally, a new code collaboration with Splunk will help jump-start the insights-driven IT operations journey by uncovering the hidden insights in their data,” shared Ravi Pendekanti, SVP, Servers & Infrastructure Solutions, Dell Technologies in a blog post.

Connected Experience with the Dell EMC PowerEdge XE7100

Technology innovation across an organization is integral to delivering customer value. Underlying this process is the Dell EMC PowerEdge XE server family of purposely-built infrastructure like designed for complex emerging workloads.

The new PowerEdge XE7100 is the industry’s highest-density 5U storage server[1] with flexible configuration options engineered for intelligent video analytics, media-streaming and object storage. It holds up to 100 high-capacity hard drives, or 67%[2] more drives than a competitive system, to store more data securely. Additionally, the PowerEdge XE7100 is equipped with one or two dual-socket nodes with up to four accelerators[3] to avoid data silos to boost inferencing performance.

The Flatiron Institute provides a highly interactive research environment for researchers, data scientists and programmers to work together through computational methods, including data analysis, theory, modeling and simulation. “Being able to retain long-term and complex data for researchers to access and collaborate in joint research is critical,” said Dr. Ian Fisk, co-director, Flatiron Institute. “The new Dell EMC PowerEdge XE7100 enables us to provide a highly collaborative IT environment to the pursuit of understanding the phenomena of our world.”

With the XE7100, high performance does not equate to higher total cost of ownership (TCO) and less  simplicity. In a standard 42U rack, the denser, 5U PowerEdge XE7100 can scale easily with up to 200 more high-capacity drives, 20% less administrative efforts, 50% fewer power cables, and it enhances power supply efficiency for lower operation costs and carbon footprint with up to 40% less power[4].

Payment solutions for PowerEdge XE7100 include Flex On Demand, which provides customers with the ability to pay for technology as they use it. When it is time to scale for business growth, it provides immediate access to buffer capacity and adjusts payments to match actual usage.

Rapid Enablement from OpenManage Systems Management Enhancements

With intelligent tools, customers can adapt and maintain the infrastructure quickly to drive innovation. When technology platforms can be enabled and expanded seamlessly, IT becomes an enabler of rapid innovation.

The Dell EMC OpenManage Systems Management portfolio enables rapid deployment and scalability of dynamic infrastructure with the following benefits:

• Reduces complexity with full-stack management capabilities in the same place for both physical and virtual hosts with OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter v.5.2. With the support of the PowerEdge XE2420 server for the Edge, OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter delivers a seamless systems management experience at full speed from the edge to the hybrid-cloud. For example, the admin can update hypervisor and firmware in an 8-node PowerEdge cluster in less than 4 minutes.[5]

• Automates and simplifies server lifecycle tasks and scales operations rapidly with OpenManage Enterprise  FlexSelect architecture, which provides ultimate flexibility and reduces the learning curve. With one interface, users can:
  • Prevent downtime through intelligent analytics, predictive alerts and automatically generated support tickets with OpenManage Enterprise SupportAssist.
  • Streamline and automate the catalog and repositories update tasks with OpenManage Enterprise Update Manager[6]
  • Identify and control underutilized resources and power consumption to aid workload planning with OpenManage Enterprise Power Manager.
• This innovative FlexSelect pluggable architecture enables seamless integrations with industry leading management consoles to make PowerEdge server management flexible.
  • Streamlines IT service and operation management workflows for broader organization with OpenManage Integration with ServiceNow.

 Joint Code Development with Splunk for Continuous Refinement

Infrastructure insights, powered by AIOps capabilities from OpenManage Systems Management tools like iDRAC, help continuously refine the data center to become resilient. iDRAC streams over 180 server telemetry metrics for proactive monitoring. Analyzing and visualizing this data helps uncover hidden insights between seemingly unrelated events for proactive management. With fine-tuning, these insights can make the infrastructure and business more flexible. OpenManage Enterprise and plugins automate notification and action following pre-defined policy, so your infrastructure is more responsive and secure.

Dell Technologies is working with the data analytics leader Splunk on code development to help organizations avoid disconnected IT silos and monitor the full spectrum of business and infrastructure performance insights in one dashboard.

[1] Based on Dell analysis, April 2020, The industry’s first standard rack depth 5U Server with support for 100 internal hard drives. AD# G20000114

Source: Dell Technologies

About the author: Tiffany Trader

With over a decade’s experience covering the HPC space, Tiffany Trader is one of the preeminent voices reporting on advanced scale computing today.