On Monday, Dell sharpened its blades, so to speak, with the launch of all-new PowerEdge M-Series blade servers.
Dell boasts 30 industry patents in its latest design that taps Dell Energy Smart technologies to help customers deal with environmental concerns in the data center.
The new M1000e blade enclosure sells for $5,999 and other blades start at $1,849.
According to Brad Anderson, senior vice president of the Dell Business Product Group, blade offerings have been long on promises and short on helping customers address the growing costs and complexity in their data centers.
“The PowerEdge M-Series delivers on those promises with unmatched energy efficiency, flexibility, performance and manageability,” Anderson said in a statement. “It enables customers to achieve the computing performance they need while lowering their overall power consumption and reducing data center complexity and server sprawl.”
Energy Efficient Blades
Anderson’s boasting is not all puffery if Dell’s numbers hold up. The server maker reports its PowerEdge M-Series consumes up to 19 percent less power and achieves up to 25 percent better performance per watt than the Hewlett-Packard BladeSystem c-Class1.
Compared to the IBM BladeCenter H, the M-Series consumes 12 percent less energy and achieves up to 28 percent better performance per watt. The M-Series also provides lead-free configurations, delivering a “green IT” solution that aims to help customers minimize their environmental impact.
The PowerEdge M1000e, a 10U-sized enclosure, supports 16 blade servers. It is optimized for Dell’s PowerEdge M600 and M605 blade servers and supports up to two quad-core Intel Xeon and quad-core AMD Opteron processors, respectively.
Competing with HP
Dell’s PowerEdge M-Series incorporates FlexIO switch technology, making it the only blade solution providing snap-in scalability all the way down to the switch interconnects. Dell said this feature helps protect and maximize a customer’s server investment by eliminating the need for wasteful “rip-and-replace” upgrades.
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