Dell’s new future-ready solutions make their debut

• Converged infra architecture, storage solutions, workload-specific appliances
• Brings Open Networking to NFV, working with Brocade and Intel

DELL Inc has announced new products and solutions that it said would help global customers on their paths toward software-defined data centres by bridging the IT gap between traditional and new application requirements.
 
Forces like cloud computing, mobility, big data, the Internet of things and software-defined IT make new application and workload types increasingly relevant to companies typically operating traditional IT processes.
 
These forces also underscore the need for IT solutions that optimise the differences between traditional and new applications, Dell said in a statement.
 
The new offerings include new converged infrastructure architecture, storage solutions, and workload- specific appliances intended to aid customers in transforming their data centres, capture cost savings, and ensure their businesses are competitive, the company claimed.
 
Dell PowerEdge FX architecture
 
Typically, customers must choose between a variety of system architectures, including best-of-breed hardware and current converged infrastructure, as the base of their data centre operations. 
 
The new Dell PowerEdge FX converged architecture would provide optimal modularity and scalability. The architecture is Dell’s approach to converged infrastructure with one common modular and scalable platform with servers, storage and networking integrated to help customers better manage, scale and budget for infrastructure to meet business needs.
 
It features a 2U enclosure with six new PowerEdge server, storage, and network IOA sleds built specifically to fit into the FX2 chassis and support varying workloads.
 
Designed with integrated management capabilities, the FX architecture enables customers to easily configure, manage and add capacity to complete workload-specific blocks of IT resources.
 
The PowerEdge FX architecture including PowerEdge FX2 chassis and initial sleds (FC630, FM120x4) will be available in December 2014. The PowerEdge FX architecture sleds including the FD332, FN IOA, FC430, FC830 will be available in the first half of 2015.
 
Storage solutions
 
The company also introduced a new Dell Storage SC Series all-flash array configuration for US$25,000, claiming it as one of the industry’s lowest-priced all-flash enterprise arrays.
 
Offering a more economical starting point for flash performance to support demanding applications, both Dell SC4020 Entry-Level All-Flash and Flash-Optimized Solutions offer all-flash storage with the added benefit of further optimising costs by easily adding one or more tiers of spinning disk to the same array.
 
The Dell Storage SC4020 Entry-Level All-Flash configuration will be available in early 2015.
 
Meanwhile, the Dell Storage PS4210 Series enterprise storage array also makes its debut, intended to bring improved performance and advanced connectivity options for entry-level primary storage and critical workloads.
 
This marks the introduction of a hybrid (flash and HDD) model to Dell’s entry-level PS Series portfolio, which is ideal for small-to-medium virtualised data centres and remote offices, the company said.
 
The PS4210 arrays are designed to be fully compatible and interoperable with all previous Dell EqualLogic PS Series arrays.
 
The Dell Storage PS4210 Series Arrays are available worldwide today.
 
Web-scale converged appliances
 
Dell also announced the worldwide availability of the Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances, which integrate compute, storage and hypervisor resources into a single offering.
 
With the XC Series, customers can manage their virtual environments at a VM (virtual machine) level, making the appliances particularly ideal for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), high performance server virtualisation, and data centres which deploy multiple hypervisors.
 
The XC Series joins Dell’s broad portfolio of software-defined storage and hyper-converged offerings for virtualisation customers and are available in five models designed to support different workloads.
 
Accelerating NFV
 
Based on open software and industry-standard server infrastructure, Dell said it, Brocade and Intel are collaborating to help telecommunications service providers improve capital and operational cost structures for service delivery and to enable quicker, simpler service innovation and creation.
 
The trio have announced plans to deliver Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV)-based solutions to virtualize and accelerate enterprise service delivery at the carrier edge.
 
The solutions leverage Dell’s newly-introduced NFV platform powered by the Intel Open Network Platform for servers architecture, and the Intel Data Plane Developer Kit combined with the Brocade Vyatta vRouter software to virtualise existing customer- and provider-edge networking functions.
 
Related Stories:
 
New all-flash storage going to be game-changer: Dell
 
Dell announces new networking and storage solutions
 
Dell advances open-networking initiative, announces new pact
 

For more technology news and the latest updates, follow @dnewsasia on Twitter or Like us on Facebook.