Dell today announced that its latest ninth-generation PowerEdge servers, based on Intel's Xeon 5100 series (Woodcrest) processors, which have been launched earlier this month, can now be delivered to customers, informs Hardware Zone.

The PowerEdge series, which includes the 1950, 2950, 2900 and 1955 blade servers are said to decrease the power consumption and deliver 152% more performances than the previous versions of the well-known 2U Dell PowerEdge server.

Moreover, the servers offer an increase in performance per watt of electricity of up to 169 percent in order to reduce the overall costs and environmental impact of data center power demands. The architecture of the PowerEdge Blade Server supports high performance Ethernet, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand connectivity options from Dell, Intel, Cisco, Topspin, Brocade, McDATA, and QLogic.

Neil Hand, vice president of worldwide enterprise marketing, stated for Information Week earlier this week that: "Dell's new servers will increase performance by 150% or better over existing Dell servers and reduce power consumption by 25%. That isn't all driven by Intel's new designs but by a lot of effort Dell has put behind these platforms to look at them holistically."

Furthermore, Dell's enhanced network-attached storage (NAS) portfolio also includes two new Dell Storage Servers - Dell's PowerEdge 2900 and PowerEdge 2950 servers.

The Dell PowerEdge 1950, 2900, 2950 and PowerEdge 1955 blade servers featuring Intel 5100 series dual-core Xeon processors are available for order. Prices for the servers start at US$3,279, US$3,875, US$4,284 and US$2,226, respectively. Prices for the Dell PowerEdge 2900 and 2950 Storage Servers start at US$5,185 and US$5,594, respectively.