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​Dell EMC previews new 14th generation PowerEdge Servers

The tech giant has doubled down on IT transformation with new 14th generation PowerEdge Servers.
Written by Asha Barbaschow, Contributor

Dell EMC has previewed its latest portfolio of PowerEdge servers at Dell EMC World on Monday, touted as providing intelligent automation via expanded APIs, and integrated security.

According to the company, legacy datacentre technologies are not agile, flexible, or efficient enough to meet the needs of businesses undergoing a "digital transformation".

"In today's digital economy, technology must transform at the speed of business to develop and deploy new applications, optimise resources, and deliver an ideal customer experience," said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, president for Server Solutions Division at Dell EMC, calling the new servers the "bedrock" of the modern datacentre.

Built with the upcoming Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family, the new PowerEdge servers will be embedded into storage and datacentre appliances, hyper-converged appliances and racks, ready nodes, bundles, and other Dell EMC products.

The new Dell EMC PowerEdge server portfolio has been enhanced with 19x more Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) low latency storage than the prior generation, and one-click BIOS tuning enabling quicker deployment of processing-intensive workloads.

The Dell EMC PowerEdge portfolio also embeds new hardware and system-level security features with quick detection capabilities to prevent unauthorised or inadvertent changes, such as system lockdown, which the company said was an industry-first feature that prevents configuration changes that create security vulnerabilities and expose sensitive data.

Features such as SecureBoot, BIOS Recovery capabilities, signed firmware, and iDRAC RESTful API also provide enhanced protection against attacks, while its system erase capability wipes user data from drives or removes all non-volatile media when a server is retired.

Dell EMC also announced its first 25GbE Open Networking switch, the S5100-ON series, boasting 100GbE uplinks designed for 100GbE fabric connectivity.

Similarly, the new S4100-ON Open Networking switches have been optimised for high densities of 10GbE fiber/copper or Fibre Channel 8/16/32 server and converged local area networks.

The newly announced Open Networking switch is based on open source technologies from the Linux Foundation and Open Compute Project.

"At Dell EMC, we believe networks work best when open, granting customers of all sizes maximum choice and capability," said Tom Burns, senior vice president, Networking, Enterprise Infrastructure & Service Provider, Dell EMC.

"By disaggregating networking system software, and by decoupling networking software from hardware platforms, companies can free themselves from the rigid and proprietary environments of yesterday to embrace software-defined principles and unlock innovation at any scale."

Currently, more than 150 petabytes of data in the cloud is managed by Dell EMC Data Protection technology, so in response, the company also announced an Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA) providing data protection across the company's applications and platforms, in addition to new cloud data protection capabilities.

"Dell EMC IDPA is an integrated solution that provides convergence across key vectors for data protection. It brings together protection storage and software, including powerful search, monitoring, and analytics, provides coverage for a wide range of applications, both physical and virtual, delivers efficient and high performance protection and recovery, and extends data protection seamlessly to public and private cloud," Beth Phalen, president, Data Protection, Dell EMC, said of the cloud-focused appliance.

"Likewise, the expansion of our cloud data protection portfolio now services data wherever it lives."

Also on Monday, Dell EMC announced a bevy of new software-defined storage products, adding support for Dell EMC PowerEdge 14th generation servers in an effort to help customers move from traditional to modern datacentres, as well as additions to its all-flash storage portfolio.

Dell EMC also launched into the lending market on Monday, announcing consumption-based models from PC-as-a-Service, through to virtual machines and storage infrastructure.

Dell Technologies Capital, the venture arm of Dell Technologies, also announced its plan to invest $100 million annually in startups.

Disclosure: Asha Barbaschow travelled to Dell EMC World as a guest of Dell EMC.

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