Dell expands server and storage lines for datacentre virtualisation

Dell's EqualLogic arrays can now offload some operations from the hypervisor

Dell has added new storage and server products to its datacentre line-up as the vendor continues to position itself as the infrastructure provider of choice for enterprise virtualisation and on-premise cloud deployments.

Among the kit announced today are PowerEdge blade servers designed for high-density and high-performance compute roles, plus additions to Dell's storage arrays including iSCSI units with automated tier support between solid-state drives (SSDs) and SAS drives.

Dell also highlighted a new version of its EqualLogic firmware that lets iSCSI storage arrays offload some file operations from the hypervisor in VMware environments, boosting performance and greatly reducing SAN traffic, according to Dell.

Described as "virtualisation optimised", the PowerEdge M710HD is the industry's first half-height server blade, according to Dell, which means that twice as many can be crammed into an M-series chassis.

Despite this, the M710HD is a two-socket system based on Intel's quad-core or six-core Xeon processors and up to 192GB of memory. Each blade also has hot-swappable hard drives and two Flash memory cards for bare-metal hypervisor operation.

The latter feature removes one of the few remaining single points of failure in a server, according to Forrest Norrod, vice president of Dell Server Platforms.

"This brings a whole new level of performance and memory capacity without compromising on reliability," he said.

A second blade server, the M610x, is designed for HPC and online transaction processing roles. This is also a two-socket Xeon system, but supports two full-bandwidth PCI Express slots that can be filled with Nvidia Tesla GPU cards for up to 1,030 gigaflops of floating-point performance or Fusion-io's high-performance SSDs for over 120,000 input/output operations per second, Dell said.

Dell also announced a rack-mount server, the PowerEdge R715, which uses AMD's 6100 series Opteron chips to deliver 24 processor cores and up to 256GB memory in a 2U chassis.