Dell PowerEdge VRTX achieves worldwide customer adoption

Thousands of customers from more than 50 countries and six continents have deployed PowerEdge VRTX with high praise. Customers in healthcare, automotive, retail, financial, manufacturing, education and other verticals have used this integrated solution in novel ways to help them enhance their office IT environment and speed up response time to customer requests.

Since the introduction of PowerEdge VRTX, channel partners around the world have completed nearly 7,000 sales and technical courses, honing their expertise to help customers improve IT efficiency through simplifying their office IT infrastructure and offering greater versatility to scale for future technology needs.

The Dell PowerEdge VRTX also continues to receive third-party recognition from around the world. It was described as “one of the most innovative server designs of the year” when receiving InfoWorld U.S.A.’s 2014 Technology of the Year Award and “double the fun” when it was awarded as one of CRN’s 2013 Products of the Year. Other accolades for PowerEdge VRTX include receiving IT Pro’s Innovation Award in the United Kingdom, Interop's Best of Show Award - Special Prize in Japan and 20 additional awards and highly positive reviews from across the globe.

PowerEdge VRTX offers simplicity, efficiency and versatility for customers
Designed as a single, compact chassis that integrates servers, storage, networking and management, the Dell PowerEdge VRTX enables users to bring order to their office environments, refine IT operations and realise greater operational efficiencies. For example:
Cadac Group, based in Heerlen, Netherland, which specialises in providing IT solutions to create, manage and share digital design information, was looking for a highly scalable and integrated solution that could enable its IT team to add performance at lower cost and boost its customer relationship management capabilities. “The beauty of the Dell PowerEdge VRTX chassis is that we gained a complete solution for our remote site, including servers, storage, networking and cabling,” said Paul Smeets, chief technology officer, Cadac Group. What’s more, I can literally pick it up and put it in my car, so if I wanted to change site location, there wouldn’t be anything stopping me.”

Ruegenwalder Muehle, headquartered in Germany is a leading family-owned food manufacturer specialised in the ham and sausage production. Ruegenwalder needed to modernise and replace their existing data centre infrastructure to increase their computing power and storage capacity as well as enhance their networking performance. For this, they decided for Dell’s VRTX solution in combination with Dell PowerEdge servers. “Our company has been leveraging the integrated design and high-availability features of the Dell PowerEdge VRTX systems since October 2013 for efficient server and storage virtualization,” said Andreas Unzner, head of IT at Ruegenwalder. “The systems provide great performance and are extremely reliable. Dell’s support has also been providing excellent support both in the design phase as well as during production.”

Caterham F1 Team, a Formula One team based in the United Kingdom needed a compact IT solution that could be managed remotely. “While our factory and team are based in the UK, our wind-tunnel testing site is based remotely in Germany,” said Bill Peters, head of IT, Caterham F1. “Having a remote, shared and mission critical environment hundreds of miles away means that we need a trusted IT solution on site that can manage all of our integrated servers, storage and networking capabilities. VRTX has proven to be an extremely efficient solution for our needs. It took only a three hour workshop to design it, and deployment was simple with just one IT staff member taking it over and plugging it in. Plus because it is virtual, the management of the system is done remotely and doesn’t require any IT presence onsite. As a result, we see a lot of potential for further implementation of the VRTX, especially in our trackside IT environment.”

New enhancements to PowerEdge VRTX bring support for additional workload choices
Dell is introducing new capabilities for PowerEdge VRTX to drive further simplicity, efficiency and performance in remote, branch and small business offices. The enhancements include:
· Next-level data protection inside the chassis: For customers requiring the highest levels of availability and redundancy possible, Dell now offers an optional redundant PowerEdge Raid Controller (PERC), which provides RAID controller failover inside the Dell PowerEdge VRTX chassis.
· More server node choices: PowerEdge VRTX now offers additional server node choices - including the 4-socket, PowerEdge M820 – to enable faster processing of workloads such as large, back-end database, business intelligence, data mining, enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications.
· Enhanced system management: By sharing a common design, Chassis Management Controller (CMC) provides PowerEdge VRTX users with a familiar systems management tool to manage local or remote VRTX systems, just as CMC does in the data centre, along with enhancements in setting, updating and maintaining server and chassis configurations.
· Expanded support for virtual desktops: Dell PowerEdge VRTX now enables VDI in remote offices and branch offices by providing support for optional graphical processing units (GPUs).

“As the server market evolves, Dell remains at the forefront of providing solutions for the diverse problems affecting customers, whether large, small or remote,” said Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager, Dell Server Solutions. “With today’s enhancements and ongoing customer momentum, Dell PowerEdge VRTX is delivering what customers need in order to realise greater simplicity and efficiency to grow their business.”