Dell EMC fulfilled a promise made earlier this year by announcing today it is making available the 14th Generation of the Dell EMC PowerEdge servers based on the Intel Xeon Scalable processor series.
Brian Payne, senior product planning manager for the Dell PowerEdge Server Portfolio, says the availability of Intel Xeon Scalable processors should significantly accelerate the transition to software-defined infrastructure because of the increased system bandwidth afforded by the NVMe backplane technology Intel developed. While NVMe has been available for some time, the Intel Xeon Scalable Series are the first processors optimized to handle the levels of throughput enabled by NVMe. Specifically, Payne says he expects to see more adoption of both hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and software-defined storage systems.
“HCI and software-defined storage are killer apps for NVMe,” says Payne.
Last October, Dell EMC announced that PowerEdge servers would be the foundational component of its HCI VxRail and VxRack platforms. The company has been using PowerEdge servers on its HCI XC Series based on appliances powered by Nutanix since 2014, while the company continues to rely on UCS servers from Cisco for its VxBlock converged infrastructure platform. Last month, Dell EMC let it be known it is retiring the original Vblock systems developed by EMC prior to its merger with Dell in favor of a VxBlock series that supports multiple types of network virtualization options on a Cisco UCS platform.
Payne says the most significant thing customers need to remember in this brave new world of software-defined infrastructure is that not all applications are created equal. Because of that, IT organizations often need to be able to dynamically make available different classes of resources to different types of applications on the same server.
Many IT organizations may simply be getting used to running more applications than ever on fewer physical boxes as the overall density of servers continues to increase. A few short years ago, IT managers were complaining that they were running out of physical space in the data center. Thanks to consolidation a few years later, it’s not uncommon to find plenty of room to spare in a modern enterprise data center environment.
