Dell Launches New PowerEdge Servers That 'Opens Up A Whole New' High Performance Market Opportunity For Partners

Dell is boosting its PowerEdge sever line by launching two new four-socket servers with improved performance that partners say opens up a whole new market opportunity for them in the high performance database market.

The Round Rock, Texas-based infrastructure giant unveiled the new PowerEdge R840 and R940xa servers at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas on Tuesday. The servers are purpose built to tackle different performance bottlenecks and address the full spectrum of customer workloads with improved response times and reduced statistical errors compared to older PowerEdge generations, said Ravi Pendekanti, senior vice president of product management and marketing for Dell's Server and Infrastructure Systems.

Scott Winslow, president of Winslow Technology Group, a Waltham, Mass. based Dell partner, said going from dual socket to quad socket servers will help the channel attack new markets.

[Related: Dell Technologies World 2018]

"When you're going from duel socket servers to quad socket servers – that just opens up a whole new market for Dell [around] large database applications with very high performance requirements," said Winslow.

The R940xa was designed to accelerates applications to deliver real-time decisions for GPU database workloads. It combines up to four CPUs with four GPUs in a 1:1 ratio and enables low-latency with direct-attached non-volatile memory express (NVMe) drives.

The R940xa is optimized for workloads which are compute layer heavy and take advantage of CPU RAM to move data into GPU RAM for faster computation. It contains up to four GPUs or up to eight field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) which Pendekanti said "are becoming very important in the market." The R940xa has mix and match capacity and performance options with up to 32 drives as well as RESTful API for developers.

The R840 is designed to "turbocharge" data analytics," said Pendekanti. The server speeds up response times with up to 24 direct attached NVMe drives, while also accelerating critical workloads with up to two GPUs or two FPGAs. "We're able to support up to 24 direct attach NVMe drives which we believe is about two times above the nearest competitors we see," Pendekanti said.

According to recent market data from research firm IDC, Dell sold the most servers worldwide during the fourth quarter of 2017 with 582,000 shipped, approximately 102,000 more than its rival Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Dell generated $3.6 billion in server sales during the fourth quarter, up 40 percent year over year.

Winslow said Dell's server business has been one of the greatest benefactors from Dell's $67 billion acquisition of EMC. "We've seen some real benefits from the Dell EMC combination in giving us the ability to go into these large accounts and work with the Dell EMC teams. We’ve had great success," said Winslow.

Winslow Technology recently won a large healthcare deal in the North East where the customer previously had hundreds of HPE servers installed. "For the first time ever, we were able to go in there with a Dell [PowerEdge] FX2 modular platform and win a significant business in there and crack into that account," Winslow said. "That's why Dell is doing so well in the server marketplace today."

Both the PowerEdge R840 and R940xa servers will be available starting on May 23.