5 Key Products Inside Dell EMC's New PowerEdge Modular Infrastructure

Here are the five key networking, storage, computing, software and chassis products that make up Dell EMC's new PowerEdge MX modular infrastructure.

Biggest Products Inside Dell EMC's PowerEdge MX

Dell EMC is storming the composable infrastructure market with its biggest innovation to date, the PowerEdge MX, a future-proof architecture that includes flexible compute, storage and networking infrastructure.

"Customers don’t want the infrastructure to be the limitation to their business in the future," said Brian Payne, vice president of PowerEdge product management and marketing for Dell EMC, in an interview with CRN. "They need a technology solution that is going to give them the flexibility to support the workloads they're running today more efficiently and the adaptability to keep up with where technology and workloads are going in the future. Our PowerEdge MX is uniquely positioned to provide that flexibility like no other offer in the market."

Here are the five key products inside Dell EMC's new PowerEdge MX modular infrastructure.

PowerEdge MX7000 Chassis

Dell EMC's newly designed PowerEdge MX7000 chassis offers a hardware foundation with support for multiple server processor generations in a scalable system with end-to-end life-cycle management and a single interface for all components. The 7U chassis includes eight bays to accommodate a variety of full- and double-width compute and storage combinations.

Dell EMC's Payne said it was time for the company to deliver a new modular infrastructure to replace its nearly decade-old M1000e blade chassis offering. A key feature inside the PowerEdge MX is that it was designed without a midplane, enabling direct compute to I/O module connections and allowing for technology upgrades without disrupting customer operations and without the need for a midplane upgrade.

OpenManage Enterprise Modular Edition

The system managing the PowerEdge MX infrastructure is Dell EMC's new OpenManage Enterprise Modular Edition, which manages compute, storage and networking with a unified interface. The multi-vendor solution enables customers to perform full life-cycle management on all PowerEdge MX components across multiple chassis at once. Customers also can access servers remotely with the OpenManage Mobile application and use OpenManage Enterprise as a turnkey deployment as a virtual appliance.

"We can provide automated and simplified network configuration for MX that plugs into higher-level orchestration tools with north-bound APIs, so we make it very simple to integrate into existing tools like VMware's vCenter or Microsoft's Systems Center," said Payne. "We also have compatibility for RESTful APIs. So if you're in a DevOps world developing a scale-out application, we can easily support RedFish APIs to enable the hardware configuration that supports a workload orchestration."

PowerEdge MX740c And MX840c

Dell EMC launched its new PowerEdge MX740c and MX840c compute servers, which are two- and four-socket blade sleds that deliver high performance and a rich set of storage options including NVMe drives. The full-width MX740c and double-width MX840c support the Intel family of Xeon scalable processors with up to six TB of memory. The MX840c holds up to four 28-core Intel Xeon processors, while the MX740c can house up to two 28-core Xeon processors. In addition, the MX740c can house up to six NVMe, SAS or SATA drive bays, and the MX840c can hold up to eight.

Targeted use cases for the MX740c include the foundation for software-defined storage and hyper-converged infrastructure, as well as dense virtualization workloads. Top use cases for the MX840c include database-driven, mission-critical applications as well as big data analytics workloads.

Networking

The company launched several new PowerEdge MX Ethernet and Fibre Channel switching modules. The low-latency, high-bandwidth switching modules for multi-chassis environments include automated processes for topology compliance, quality of service and autonomous healing for peak network performance with the PowerEdge MX single management interface. Dell EMC said PowerEdge MX is the industry's first modular infrastructure to deliver end-to-end 25-GbE and 3-Gbps Fibre Channel host connectivity. Combined with 100-GbE and 32-GbE Fibre Channel uplinks, the company said customers can expect up to a 55 percent reduction in switching latency for highly scalable, multi-chassis fabric architectures.

The new networking products include the MX5108n Ethernet Switch, MX9116n Fabric Switching Engine, MX7116n Fabric Expander Module and the MXG610s Fibre Channel Switch.

Storage

The Dell EMC PowerEdge MX5016s storage offering is a dense, full-width, scale-out storage sled that complements MX servers. It can hold up to 16 hot-pluggable SAS storage hard disk drives, with a maximum of seven MX5016s sleds in the MX chassis for up to 112 drives of direct-attached storage. The drives can be individually mapped to one or more servers.

Targeted use cases for the MX5016s are around software-defined storage, particularly for solutions like VMware vSAN, as well as for high-storage-demand databases such as SQL and ERP.

Advertisement