Q&A

Dell recently launched its new range of energy efficient blade servers, the PowerEdge M-Series, designed to deliver lower power and cooling requirements in a compact and flexible form factor. Pallab Talukdar, Director Enterprise Strategy Group, Dell India speaks to Ashwani Mishra on the features and competence of the product with other players in the market

How would the new product help Dell to expand its presence in a market already dominated by rivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard?

One of the areas that we did have a product gap was in the area of blades. We did have a blade product but it was three years old and not contemporary. This reflected in our overall market share. If you look at the X-86 category, there are three form factors viz. the tower, rack and the blade kind of servers. 

In the rack server space, Dell has emerged as the largest player especially in the one and two socket category where majority of the rack mount servers are deployed. So for Dell’s existing customers who want to consolidate, this is a logical upgrade path.

Secondly, customers who are evaluating blades for the first time have a clear chart of our offerings versus the competition.

What is your USP vis-à-vis competition in the blade server space?

The product has been primarily designed to achieve better power efficiency. We commissioned Principle Technologies to carry out a comparison of the performance per Watt of dual socket blade servers offered by Dell, HP and IBM.

The results showed that the new Dell blades consumes 19 percent less energy than HP c-Class Blades and delivers 25 percent better performance per Watt. A rack full of Dell blades consumes 3200 Watts less than HP c Class Blades. This translates to 28000 plus KWh power saving i.e. Rs 1.4 lacs in cost saving and 18 tons in CO2 emission.

Comparing with IBM; Dell Blades consume 12 percent less energy than IBM Blade Center H and delivers 29 percent better performance per Watt. A rack full of Dell Blades consumes 2600 Watts less than IBM Blade Center H. This translates to 16000 plus KWh power saving, Rs 0.80 lacs in cost saving and 11 tons in CO2 emission.

What are the features offered by the new chassis?

The product is future proof and has been designed for a throughput of more than 5 terabytes per second. First and foremost, the chassis shipped by us is lead free. It has an upgradeable Ethernet blade switch, with four 1Gigabit (GB) ports and optional upgradeable ports for stacking or 10 GB Ethernet.

There are three Cisco Ethernet switch options. Customers can choose between a switch with all 1 GB ports, 1 GB ports plus stacking ports or a combination of 1 GB and 10 GB plus stacking. The product has been designed to support quad data rate InfiniBand as well.

There are two Brocade 4 GB Fiber Channel connectivity options; FC4 host bus adapters from QLogic and Emulex as well as an InfiniBand mezzanine card from Mellanox.The rear of the product has two chassis management controllers. There is also an integrated keyboard video monitor (KVM). These capabilities would allow users to carry out a thorough configuration and configuration management of the product. Instead of putting a third party external KVM to manage a number of blades users can use a single integrated KVM.

System management is a big concern for data centers, and customers are looking for the ability to manage systems without the need for additional IT personnel. How would this product address this issue?

We have a management tool known as Open Manage. The Open Manage performs all functions like configuration, deployment, monitoring and change management.

It is based Intelligent Platform Management Interface 2.0 (IPMI 2.0), which is an open interface. IPMI 2.0 allows users to interconnect with any third party management suite that are used. So there is no need to use any new management stack. Our product would get integrated even if the users are using IBM Tivoli or Unicenter or OpenView. (IPMI 2.0 is designed to extend customers' IT capabilities and improve remote management by introducing enhanced security, remote access and configuration capabilities, while maintaining compatibility with previous IPMI versions). We don’t want customers to change their management software because they are buying Dell. This offering is yet another USP of the product.