… Dell EMC Advancements to PowerEdge Servers With Optane …

Dell EMC, part of Dell Technologies, announces advancements to PowerEdge servers, the server portfolio (2), offering improved management, security, performance and scalability for customers’ everyday and most demanding workloads.

These advancements and OpenManage systems management enable a secure, scalable compute platform as the foundation for cloud, analytics and software-defined data center initiatives.

“As organizations rapidly keep pace with growing sets of information and data, they’re also adopting more advanced applications to generate greater insights with digital transformation efforts,” said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, president, server and infrastructure systems, Dell EMC. “Making the industry-leading PowerEdge server portfolio even stronger, we are enabling our customers to benefit from additional automation, control and security with more responsive and powerful systems.“

According to IDC’s latest research, the company continued to be number one in both x86 server revenue and units shipped globally in an industry that saw its greatest demand ever during 2018. The analyst firm’s research found worldwide server vendor revenues increased 12.6% Y/Y to $23.6 billion, during 4018, marking the fifth consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth and the all-time high for total revenue in any quarter ever. For x86 servers, the firm holds the number one position for revenue for six consecutive quarters and units shipped for more than the past two years. ⁽²⁾

Offers advanced infrastructure to tackle for more advanced workloads
PowerEdge servers deliver an automated, secure and scalable platform, allowing businesses to balance operational efficiency and strategic initiatives. This supports organizations tasked with driving higher engagement with customers and meeting SLAs while adopting new workloads and meeting new business objectives.

Advancements to PowerEdge and OpenManage systems management offer customers more control to manage their server infrastructure and to mitigate threats, backed by a boost in performance and scalability. Among the new features, the introduction of OpenManage FlexSelect Manage and FlexSelect Secure provides improved flexibility for managing and securing PowerEdge systems. Customers can expect to gain several benefits and capabilities:

Greater control:

• Launch of the FlexSelect Manage architecture offers customers new flexibility to choose among specific OpenManage Enterprise capabilities. Delivered first by a power management plug-in, this reduces the number of consoles necessary to match users’ own specific needs and further streamline management efficiency.

• Enhancements to the Redfish-compliant Dell EMC RESTful API for control of more server operations and devices including flexibility to manage servers directly from an OS in addition to a typical management network. This enables users to integrate PowerEdge servers into their existing processes for a more consistent server management experience.

• Augmented reality on OpenManage Mobile offers customers a graphical representation of exactly where incidents occur within their environment to accurately identify target areas in their PowerEdge MX infrastructure and help speed resolution-from any mobile device. Customers can reduce time to maintain server health by 28%, through fewer steps, compared to manually retrieving server logs.

• Through the company and Intel collaboration, PowerEdge servers can discover, monitor, configure and update supported Optane DC persistent memory and Optane DC SSDs with OpenManage agent-free management. This enables customers to save time by automating configuration of BIOS, drives and memory. Through auto-discovery, these configurations can be replicated across multiple servers without manual intervention, freeing up IT staff from manual tasks.

Enhanced security:

• Scale data protection and streamline management of self-encrypting drives with new OpenManage Secure Enterprise Key Manager. This enables customers to centrally manage keys for self-encrypting drives to secure data at both the drive and server level.

• OpenManage FlexSelect Secure capability gives customers the flexibility to adapt and scale their security solutions to meet their business requirements. For example, new security and encryption options added to the integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) offer flexibility to allow communications among server components and outside connectivity based on one’s own security policies.

Improved performance and scalability:

• With new 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable processors, PowerEdge customers can better drive their digital transformations with improved performance. PowerEdge servers with these new processors offer up to a 40% increase in performance for core business applications, helping to improve organizations’ overall internal and external customer experiences. ⁽³⁾ BIOS tuning with workload-optimized server configuration profiles allow customers to configure performance as they add new technologies or workloads.

• According to a benchmark, a single PowerEdge R940 server with 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable processors can host 69,500 simultaneous users with ‘SAP Sales and Distribution’ software. This demonstrates a 60.5% increase in supported users from a single server compared to the R930 server. ⁽⁴⁾

• With Optane DC persistent memory, customers can accelerate in-memory databases, virtualization and data analytics workloads with up to 2.5 times more memory capacity for select PowerEdge Servers. ⁽⁵⁾ The PowerEdge R740xd enables up to 2.7 times the transactions per second with an Optane DC persistent memory compared to NVMe drives in a virtualized SQL Server 2019 preview environment with VMware ESXi. ⁽¹⁾

• The firm’s Ready Solutions enable customers to drive insights faster for HPC and AI applications, and, with the Intel Deep Learning Boost, make it easier for customers to tackle parallel use cases, such as deep learning, offering nearly three times faster inerferencing performance in neural networks. ⁽⁶⁾

These features are enabled and supported by OpenManage systems management portfolio, which removes complexity, allowing customers to manage their infrastructure. Additionally, the iDRAC is a foundational element of the PowerEdge portfolio that enables automation of server deployment, configuration, updates and maintenance procedures.

Availability:

• OpenManage updates will be available across the PowerEdge portfolio throughout the 2Q19.

• PowerEdge servers with 2nd Generation Xeon Scalable processors and EMC Ready Solutions for HPC with Intel Deep Learning Boost will be available in 2Q19.

• Optane DC persistent memory will be available for hands-on trials through a the company’s customer proof of concept program and through Dell Technologies Customer Solution Centers beginning this April and available later in 2Q19 on select two- and four-socket PowerEdge servers.

• Updated PowerEdge servers will become available as the foundation for Ready Solutions and the company’s hyperconverged infrastructure portfolio in 2019.

Troy Crabtree, EVP, operations, Cybera, Inc., said: “We run a demanding cloud-based managed application network where performance is critical. With 90,000 access points and the largest SD-WAN network globally, Cybera customers are accessing our application network any time of the day, all across the world, to successfully run their businesses. We are able to meet high performance demands and continually add new services by using Dell EMC PowerEdge servers as the foundation for our scalable, secure and reliable multi-cloud services platform. The improved performance of our PowerEdge infrastructure with 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors will enable us to accelerate our response times and continue to exceed our customers’ expectations.“

Tim Grieser, VP, system management software, IDC Research, said: “We are seeing the IT system and service management software market growing more than 7% through 2023. This is driven by a need to automate and manage greater efficiency across increasingly complex on-premises, private cloud, public cloud and multi-cloud environments. We’re seeing Dell Technologies refining its OpenManage suite of capabilities to deliver a robust management platform for these more modern, dynamic IT infrastructures.“

Resources:
PowerEdge servers
Direct2Dell EMC Blog: Drive everyday workloads today and be ready to innovate tomorrow
Blog: Work Smarter and Increase Productivity with the Latest Version of Dell EMC OpenManage Enterprise

(1) Based on Dell EMC internal testing in March 2019 comparing a PowerEdge R740xd with 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable processors and 2 x 1.6TB Mixed Use NVMes using SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.3, VMware ESXi 6.7U1 and a RHEL 7.6GA vs the same R740xd configuration except for substituting the NVMes for 12 x 256GB DIMMs of Optane DC Persistent Memory. Workload used is derived from TPC-C to SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.3 performance. The results obtained with the derived workload are not comparable to published TPC-C results. Results will vary.
(2) Source: IDC Quarterly Server Tracker, Q4 2018.
(3) Preliminary results based on Dell EMC internal testing comparing a PowerEdge R740 with Xeon Scalable processors (first generation) Silver 4116 vs. a PowerEdge R740 with 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable processors Silver 4216 running SPECcpu2017 int_rate_base, February 2019. Results will vary.
(4) Results of the PowerEdge R940 on the two-tier SAP SD standard application benchmark 69,500 users; average dialog response time: 0.97s. Throughput: Fully processed order line items per hour 7,600,330, Dialog steps per hour: 22.801.000, SAPS: 380,020. SAP benchmark with enhancement package 5 for SAP ERP 6.0, SAP ASE 16; SLES15; with 2nd Gen Xeon Platinum 8280 CPUs (4 CPUs, 112 cores and 224 threads) and 1,536GB of memory. Results as of March 2019. Comparison is to a similarly equipped R930 server, 43,300 users; Average dialog response time: 0.98s.  Throughput: Fully processed order line items per hour 4,730,330, Dialog steps per hour: 14,191,000, SAPS: 236,520.: SAP benchmark with enhancement package 5 for SAP ERP 6.0, SAP ASE 16; RHEL 7.2; with Xeon processor E7-8894 v4 CPUs (4 CPUs, 96 cores and 192 threads) and 1024GB of memory. Certification number: #2017001 from 2017-02-06. Details regarding this benchmark are available upon request from hardware partner or SAP AG.
(5) Based on Dell internal analysis, comparing select PowerEdge servers using Optane DC Persistent Memory DIMMs and/or DRAM DIMMs vs. just using DRAM DIMMs, January 2019.
(6) INT8 performance test inference benchmark for image classification with ResNet50 performed in the Dell EMC HPC and AI Innovation Lab, March 2019. Results will vary.