Dell Blades maximize space usage in your data center

Nitin Phadnis,
National Manager, Server Marketing,
Dell India

Equipped with the broadest non-proprietary server portfolio in the market, Dell’s server portfolio includes the choices needed to fit each customer’s needs, from simple to complex, standard performance to high performance, in every form-factor. The company offers a full portfolio of servers, from small servers for a remote site or small business to mainstream environments up to very large 4-socket servers and multi-core. VARINDIA talked to Nitin Phadnis, National Manager, Server Marketing,  Dell India. 

What is the importance of a server solution in the IT functioning of an organization?

A Server is the basic building block of the data center. The organization’s core business logic, i.e. the core applications, is hosted on the organization’s data-center server infrastructure. With servers becoming more and more virtualized, organizations have got more benefits, viz. better resource utilization, reduction in power & cooling costs and better manageability.

What, according to you, is a "Smart Server" – a server that can perform its basic functions along with delivering cost efficiency, effective data center management, improved agility, efficiency and IT service quality?

A smart server infrastructure is one that reduces the routine but necessary Server management tasks and helps the IT teams focus more on their core functions rather than “managing” servers. For example, Dell’s OpenManage portfolio helps customers improve IT efficiency, increase IT productivity and reduce IT operational costs. The management capabilities embedded  in each of our servers enable you to use the same management processes for five servers, 5,000 or more.  

What is the latest in technology in the Server market?

Multinode servers are the latest to have emerged in server technology. 

Multinode (skinless) servers, which, like blades, utilize common system components, such as shared power supplies and cooling fans, and enable easy hardware provisioning. Unlike blades, multinode servers are usually deployed horizontally in trays that fit into the rack, but connectivity is equally proprietary. 

Multinode servers are an even more rack-dense form-factor that has emerged during the past four years to address many extreme scale-out workload requirements that, ironically, blades were first designed to address. We now see the emergence of extreme low-energy servers (typically based on low-cost processors from Intel, AMD and ARM) that will extend the horizontal scaling further – again, usually based on some modular, tray-based form-factor. 

Dell offers its PowerEdge Cloud range of servers which have the capability to fit 4 / 8 motherboards / skinless servers in a single 2U / 4U chassis.

What are blade servers and how do they benefit IT organizations?

A blade server is a stripped-down server computer with a modular design optimized to minimize the use of physical space and energy.

The need for increased business efficiency, combined with the rapid evolution of virtualized, standards-based open architectures, is leading to a sea change in the way enterprise technology is built and deployed – and blade servers can be a key strategy.

By packing more servers into less space and sharing many components, blade solutions are able to:

• Use less power, helping you lower IT costs and get more from racks and data centers that have power limits 

• Improve IT responsiveness to business needs by simplifying data center management 

• Conserve data center space and resources, giving you flexibility over when and how to expand your data center 

Dell offers industry-leading blade server solutions that excel in flexibility and performance per watt, while offering unparalleled ease of management.

Benefits of Dell Blade Servers

By reducing space, power and management requirements, Dell blades can maximize space usage in your data center, lower your power needs and costs, and increase your IT staff productivity. 

What are some of the products and solutions offerings that Dell has to offer in the Server space?

Dell has the broadest non-proprietary server portfolio in the market.  

The server portfolio includes the choices needed to fit each customer’s needs, from simple to complex, standard performance to high performance, in every form-factor.

We offer a full portfolio of servers, from small servers for a remote site or small business to mainstream environments up to very large 4-socket servers and multi-core. We have every form-factor, racks, towers, blades and density-optimized servers. 

How can a server contribute to effective data center management?

Dell’s newest PowerEdge servers, the 12th generation of the PowerEdge line, are designed to improve efficiency in the data center by automating day-to-day tasks, enabling simple deployment and provisioning, making infrastructure management easier for administrators and by saving costs with a number of energy-efficient features. There are four features of Dell’s 12th-generation PowerEdge servers that make them more energy efficient when compared to previous generations. Together, they help Dell’s newest PowerEdge servers deliver 47x greater performance per watt over servers the company featured just three generations ago. Many IT administrators are exploring power and cooling solutions that take a new approach to industry standard temperatures and cooling. Dell is engineering its servers to operate at higher ambient air temperatures. The Dell Chiller-Less Fresh Air solution brings outside (chiller-less) air into the data center to support the cooling. This results in lower-power consumption in the data center. 

edit@varindia.com