Dell Releases Lean, Mean Blades

By Greg McNevin

January 22, 2008: Dell is rolling out new additions to its PowerEdge blade server line, claiming it can cut power consumption by 19 percent compared to HP’s solutions while delivering 28 percent better performance per watt than IBM.

With the PowerEdgeTM M-Series, Dell is taking a firm step into direct competition with industry verterans HP and IBM, and to build on its green portfolio the company says the M-Series was designed from the ground up with its Energy Smart technologies.

Dell claims the new blades consume up to 19 percent less power while achieving up to 25 percent better performance per watt than the HP’s BladeSystem c-Class1, and compared to the IBM BladeCenter H, it consumes 12 percent less energy and achieves up to 28 percent better performance per watt.

Dell says the line helps businesses and data centres save on power and cooling costs while increasing server capacity, making it ideal for virtualisation. Additionally, Dell claims that it is the only blade solution to currently provide snap-in scalability all the way down to the switch interconnects.

According to Brad Anderson, Dell’s Business Product Group senior vice president, “Blade offerings have been long on promises and short on helping customers address the growing costs and complexity in their data centers,”

He says that the new M-Series can deliver on these promises, and do it while providing “unmatched energy efficiency, flexibility, performance and manageability” by delivering computational performance while lowering overall power consumption and reducing complexity and server sprawl.

The new M1000e blade enclosure is now available worldwide for ordering with a starting price of $5,999 (AU$6,825), along with blades starting at US$1,849 (AU$2,105).

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