The Latest Dell PowerEdge further Boost IT Productivity and allows Greater Buisness Control

New Dell Systems Management Capabilities Bolster Customer Successes for Fast-growing Dell PowerEdge FX2 Modular Infrastructure.

Dell announced updates to the systems management portfolio for the Dell PowerEdge FX2 modular infrastructure to help customers further maximize IT productivity and business continuity. The new features enhance provisioning and infrastructure visibility, plus add support for Nagios users and open source applications.

Dell’s overall blade server growth is bolstered by the PowerEdge FX2, which is significantly outpacing industry blade server growth. The PowerEdge FX2 has demonstrated triple-digit percentage growth year-over-year in unit and revenue over the previous four quarters, contributing substantially to PowerEdge blade server gains, since its launch in 2014¹.   According to IDC, Dell PowerEdge blade servers experienced 34 percent year-over-year revenue growth and grew 17 percent faster than the industry in the first quarter of 2016.²

“Cloud, Social, Mobility, Big Data & Analytics have increased the demand for compute resources significantly. Customers seek solutions that provide them with scalability, hyper efficiency, automation and modularity in real-time,” says Manish Gupta, Director & General Manager, Enterprise Solutions Group, Dell India. “With the updates to the systems management portfolio for the Dell PowerEdge FX2 modular infrastructure, customers can create an environment in their datacenter that addresses their workload demands as well as improves their overall IT productivity.”

“Our customers are interested in making their IT infrastructure more flexible and efficient to address evolving business and workload demands in real-time.” said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, vice president and general manager, Dell Server Solutions. “With strong systems management capabilities, the PowerEdge FX2 can help customers meet their goals by supporting traditional applications and new workloads driven by social, mobile, analytics and cloud computing in a modular infrastructure. These attributes combined with recent customer successes is driving unprecedented growth.”

Improved Management and Industry Software Integration for Dell PowerEdge FX2

Dell has enhanced its systems management software to take advantage of the unique engineering of the Dell PowerEdge FX2 and is designed to simplify and automate critical hardware management tasks. New capabilities and updates enhance the user experience with improved ease of provisioning for virtualized workloads, plug-ins for Nagios users, and comprehensive infrastructure visibility and flexibility to run open source applications.

This includes:

• Dell OpenManage Essentials 2.2 enables fast provisioning of I/O aggregators with template-based processes that easily and uniformly replicate the assignment of vLANs during the blade port mapping process, which ensures simplicity and accuracy in network set-up. The new geographic view feature enables quick, easy location access to PowerEdge FX2 systems onsite or across the globe with manageability across 5500 devices.  Additionally, seamless integration with SupportAssist³ provides proactive, predictive support and automated case creation to resolve hardware issues up to 90% faster with ProSupport Plus⁴
• The new OpenManage plug-in for Nagios XI 1.0 extracts detailed PowerEdge FX2 infrastructure information from the Dell Chassis Management Controller and server embedded intelligence, iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller, delivering a unified set of alerts and health monitoring details to Nagios XI As a result, customers can continue using their Nagios XI console to monitor Dell hardware without additional tools or training while achieving a higher return on their investment.
• New Active System Manager (ASM) 8.2 capabilities enable fast and easy on-boarding and deployment of IT services across multiple chassis, server, storage and networking devices.  The port view provides a visual mapping of physical and virtual infrastructures and any connectivity issues to allow for quick troubleshooting to help IT teams maintain business continuity and deliver more consistent, reliable IT services. Additionally, a new software developer kit (SDK) simplifies creating and deploying complex applications using readily available open source modules.

Customers' Views

With the Dell PowerEdge FX2 and Dell system management software, customers across 70 countries are taking advantage of the integrated building blocks of servers, storage and networking that help them achieve data center flexibility and efficiency without having to overhaul their existing infrastructure. Examples include:

Tracewell Systems, an Ohio-based Dell OEM partner, makes it possible for defense agencies, commercial businesses and OEMs to deploy Dell’s powerful FX architecture “beyond the back office,” in settings where standard systems are not designed to operate, such as space-constrained or rugged environments. Engineered from the ground up, in partnership with Dell OEM Solutions, the Tracewell T-FX2 products feature identical compute, network, storage and system management tools, making them fully interoperable with Dell PowerEdge FX technology. The T-FX2 family of products currently includes three distinct platforms: T-FX2 for solutions that require Dell’s FX2 in a smaller form factor; T-FX2s for solutions that require integration with full-size, high-power PCIe cards or specialty hardware; and T-FX2e for the next generation of hyper-converged, storage-intensive applications.

“The Tracewell T-FX2 family of products is perfect for customers who want to deliver workloads optimized for the data center – big data analytics, software-defined storage, VDI – on converged platforms that can operate in small or unusual places,” says Matt Tracewell, vice president at Tracewell Systems. With the Dell PowerEdge FX2, we can deliver modular building blocks that are configurable in multiple combinations of compute and storage nodes, and combine the density and flexibility of blades with the advantages of rack-based systems. These capabilities, combined with simplified management tools, such as iDRAC and Dell OpenManage technology, have helped us deliver an unrivaled solution and significantly enhance our customer satisfaction.”