Dell to Introduce New Blade Server Family: the PowerEdge

Dell has just unveiled the new series of PowerEdge blade servers for increased data center energy efficiency and flexibility. The M-series is built around the company's proprietary Dell Energy Smart technologies, which makes the family not only more efficient, but also more energy efficient.

According to its manufacturers, the M-series would take up 19 percent less power at no performance compromise. More than that, server performance has been tuned to achieve 25 percent performance boost comparing to HP's BladeSystem c-Class1. All these new features prove to be extremely useful for corporate or data center use, since they can save on power and cooling costs while increasing server capacity.

"Blade offerings have been long on promises and short on helping customers address the growing costs and complexity in their data centers," said Brad Anderson, senior vice president, Dell Business Product Group. "The PowerEdge M-Series delivers on those promises with unmatched energy efficiency, flexibility, performance and manageability. It enables customers to achieve the compute performance they need while lowering their overall power consumption and reducing data center complexity and server sprawl."

The new blade servers feature new chassis and blade design, as well as updated connectivity options to meet the users' needs. "The PowerEdge M-Series was the most extensive R&D program we've ever done," claimed Rick Becker, vice president of solutions for Dell.

The updated line include stronger handles for carrying individual blades, as well as a new chassis. The connectivity options have been improved, and the blade servers now support 10-Gigabit Ethernet controllers, as well as the old 1-Gigabit ports. Also, the servers can now be managed both locally and remotely, thanks to the KVM (keyboard/video/ mouse) switch.

The PowerEdge M1000e is a 10U rack enclosure that can host up to 16 blade servers, but works best with Dell's M600 and M605 models. They support up to two quad-core Intel Xeon and quad-core AMD Opteron processors, respectively. Both models are up to 60 percent denser than other standard servers, which allows for better space management inside data centers or server farms.