When Dell Technologies – a company that made its name by building personal computers to order – unveiled its latest range of data center hardware last month, the product line unabashedly recalled the company’s roots.
The PowerEdge MX portfolio of products from Dell EMC, the subsidiary created when Dell acquired storage specialist EMC Corp. for $67 billion in 2015, lets buyers build server, storage and networking infrastructures that can be tailored and scaled at speed to manage their specific workloads, leaving no doubt that the newly-crowned world leader in server sales is taking a similar approach to enterprise customers.
All-Inclusive Servers
Thanks to an architecture it calls “unique,â€Opens a new window servers built with MX components also can accommodate emerging technologies, with a particular nod to the applications utilizing artificial intelligence, machine learning and the Internet of Things.
Software-defined resource management gives customers a leg up, says the Texas-based company, meaning that buyers of Dell EMC servers can forgo the costs associated with more expensive upgrades and would-be migrations to the cloud to achieve similar benefits.
Dell EMC uses what it calls “server disaggregation†to create this flexibility: Disparate pools of processing power and storage capacity are networked and can be configured, called on and changed as needed.
In addition, because these “resource blocks†of the MX range are built without midplanes (the server modules with connections on either side that enable them to link both to processing and storage peripherals and to each other in network architectures) their direct-to-compute input/output switches can be adapted to future generations of tech.
Proliferating Portfolio
The emerging technologies include central and graphics processors from a full spectrum of makers and OEMs, as well as the field-programmable gate arrays of integrated circuits that can be configured post-deployment.
The MX range includes a central chassis and sleds for both compute and storage, as well as Ethernet and Fiber Channel switching modules that can accommodate eight 25-gigabit connections per server. Taken together, the fabric of smart input/output channels lessens the oversubscription that results from devices connected to the same server vying for processing power and capacity.
The product portfolio is not just the result of an engineering vision pursued by the Texas-based company over nearly a decade. It also reflects a reconfiguring of the company’s business model from direct sales of PCs to the making of enterprise computing and cloud infrastructures.
Predicting Processing
Working from analyst estimates that 75% of enterprise computer processing will occur outside the data center by 2022 (up from around 10% today) the company is building and marketing what it calls Micro-Modular Data Centers Opens a new window (MMDCs) that can run in tandem with on-premises counterparts.
The MMDCs come pre-configured for compute and storage, with power and cooling systems and network gateways, and aim to facilitate the data-driven operations that need not take place in a centralized data center.
Deploying units nearer the edge, where the devices they network reside, spares the routing of information back to on-premise centers for processing, therefore lowering the latency of command execution for data-driven operations. Additionally, and as with the MX range, those servers and the networks they comprise can be managed and controlled on a unified platform, from a single screen.
Like the MX servers, Dell Technologies’ subsidiaries – including Pivotal (software), RSA and SecureWorks (security), Virtustream and VMware (virtualization) – are the products of a spate of acquisitions based on the same kind of modular approach that began not long after the company started in 2007 to shift away from the direct-to-consumer marketing that had boosted it to prominence in PCs.
The decade-long quest to build competence and boost sales saw Dell grow year-on-year revenues by 50% in the first quarter of 2018, and for the first time surpass HPE is sales volumes and units sold.