Dell Malaysia rolls out 'future-proof' PowerEdge FX servers

• Launched last month, started shipping yesterday
• Expects potential demand from service providers

DELL Inc expects a “favourable” response in Malaysia for its newly-unveiled PowerEdge FX servers, saying they have been architected to meet the requirements of service providers.

According to Dell Malaysia’s head of enterprise solutions William Tan, the Dell PowerEdge FX has all the right ingredients to win in the server space.
 
The Dell PowerEdge FX, now in its 13th generation, was officially launched last month and started shipping yesterday (Dec 3).
 
“We just started selling it, but we foresee it’s going to be good especially for service providers such as the cloud and web hosters,” Tan told a media briefing in Kuala Lumpur. “They will love the flexibility and the scalability.”
 
The data centre is evolving and businesses are facing pressures to support existing application requirements while using IT in new and exciting ways – all within tight financial constraints.
 
Typically, customers must choose between a variety of systems architectures – including best-of-breed hardware and current converged infrastructure – as the base of their data centre operations, said Tan.
 
With the new Dell PowerEdge FX, customers will not be put in the position to make tough choices, as the converged architecture combines the best of traditional and new infrastructure features, he added.
 
“The new Dell PowerEdge FX converged architecture provides optimal modularity and scalability. It will help our customers to better manage, scale and budget for infrastructure to meet their business needs,” Tan claimed.
 
The launch of the new architecture is also part of the company's efforts to help customers on their paths towards software-defined data centres, by bridging the IT gap between traditional and new applications requirements.
 
The Dell PowerEdge FX features a 2U enclosure with six new PowerEdge servers, storage, and network IOA sleds built specifically to fit into the FX2 chassis and support different types of workloads.
 
“What we have done is that we have taken a 2U space and turned it into a chassis. Now customers can have options; they can have multiple combinations of servers, storage and networking,” said Tan.

“It is modularised – instead of a 17-inch rack, now customers have a 3.5-inch mini rack. It is more affordable to customers. They don't have to commit to a big infrastructure investment upfront; it is just 2U.
 
“Now you get the best of both worlds – a compact, converged, computing infrastructure. I think this is a paradigm shift that will win the server industry,” he claimed.
 
Web-scale Converged Appliances

Besides unveiling the Dell PowerEdge FX, Tan (pic) also shared more details on Dell’s other new products, especially the Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances.
 
These converged appliances integrate compute, storage and hypervisor resources into a single offering, powered by Nutanix software.
 
“The industry is transitioning. Today, we have virtualised servers, but storage typically still runs on a storage area network (SAN). In a virtualised environment, you need the SAN because virtual machines (VMs) may move from one server to another due to workloads requirements.
 
“It is okay but may not be ideal. While the VM resides on the servers, the actual disk or the data is spread across multiple volumes; it doesn’t follow the VM. So a lot of times this is not ideal, and the network can be a bottleneck,” Tan said.

Although such a bottleneck can be alleviated by the availability of a fibre channel that runs on 16Gbps, Tan said that demand for bandwidth may become higher as systems become more virtualised.
 
“This means highly virtualised workloads may become more complex to scale,” he added.
 
He said this is where the new Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliance stands out, as it does not need a SAN.
 
Google and Amazon make very little use of SANs. “They all run on this kind of architecture. There is no shared storage,” said Tan.
 
“This means that if you want to add more VMs, more processing, more memory, just get another unit. You don’t have to worry about storage, or the SAN. Just scale out. It is simple to configure,” he proclaimed.
 
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