Dell EMC launches PowerEdge MX

With its unique kinetic infrastructure, customers can break free from the bounds of technology silos and time-consuming, routine operational management while also dynamically assigning IT to optimally match different applications and needs.

“While emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, IoT and software-defined storage and networking, offer competitive benefits, their workloads can be difficult to predict and pose new challenges for IT departments,” said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, president and general manager, Dell EMC Server and Infrastructure Systems. “PowerEdge MX enables a modular approach to flexibly build and combine compute, storage and networking, so organisations can transform their IT in a way that optimises resources and offers investment protection for future generations of technological advances.”

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX portfolio, designed with kinetic infrastructure

The PowerEdge MX ecosystem includes a newly designed chassis and precisely-sized resource blocks of servers and storage that connect to the infrastructure through a smart I/O fabric.

The PowerEdge MX is designed for the software-defined data center – able to support a combination of dense virtualization, software-defined storage, software-defined networking, artificial intelligence and big data projects. Designed to support the latest low latency NVMe drives and native 25GbE connectivity, customers can tailor compute and storage configurations to their own requirements and benefit from shared pools of disaggregated resources to respond to changing needs as they happen. By creating on-the-fly hardware capacity, overprovisioning and stranded assets are reduced as performance and efficiency are optimised.

PowerEdge MX, with its kinetic infrastructure, is uniquely designed without a mid-plane, enabling support for multiple generations of technology releases – processor technologies, new storage types and new connectivity innovations – well into the future. Specifically, the absence of a mid-plane enables direct compute to I/O module connections, allowing for future technology upgrades without disrupting customer operations and without a mid-plane upgrade. With this approach, PowerEdge MX is prepared to one day support fully disaggregated components, down to memory-centric devices, such as storage class memory, GPUs and FPGAs, to offer customers full composability.

Customers have the flexibility to customise their PowerEdge MX with a robust portfolio of components:

• Dell EMC PowerEdge MX7000 chassis – Offers an efficient hardware foundation with support for multiple server processor generations, in a scalable system with end-to-end lifecycle management and a single interface for all components, enabling organisations to focus more on their business priorities than IT maintenance. This 7U chassis includes eight bays to accommodate a variety of single- and double-width compute and storage combinations.

• Dell EMC PowerEdge MX740c and MX840c compute sleds – Two- and four-socket blade sleds deliver full-featured, no compromise compute, with exceptional performance and a rich set of storage options including NVMe drives. The full-width MX740c and double-width MX840c support the full Intel® Xeon Scalable Processor family with up to six terabytes of memory. The MX740c is the industry’s only single-width, two-socket, modular server that can house and tier up to six 2.5” NVMe, SAS or SATA drives. The MX840c can hold up to and tier eight drives.

• Dell EMC PowerEdge MX5016s storage sled – Dense, full-width, scale-out storage sleds complement MX servers, holding up to 16 hot-pluggable SAS storage hard disk drives, with a maximum of seven MX5016s sleds in the MX chassis for up to 112 drives of direct-attached storage. These drives can be individually mapped to one or more servers, offering the ideal storage ratio needed for specific use cases.

• Dell EMC PowerEdge MX Ethernet and Fibre Channel switching modules – These new low latency, high-bandwidth switching modules for multi-chassis environments include automated processes for topology compliance, quality of service and autonomous healing for peak network performance with the PowerEdge MX single management interface. PowerEdge MX is the industry’s first modular infrastructure to deliver end-to-end 25GbE and 32Gbps fibre channel host connectivity. Combined with 100GbE and 32G fibre channel uplinks, customers can expect up to a 55 percent reduction in switching latency for highly-scalable, multi-chassis fabric architectures.

The PowerEdge MX also benefits from comprehensive in-system management, including Dell EMC OpenManage Enterprise – Modular Edition, which delivers key functions of OpenManage Enterprise management within the server chassis for the entire environment. Customers can perform full lifecycle management on all PowerEdge MX components across multiple chassis’ at once; roll-out changes and templates faster; and access servers remotely with the Dell EMC OpenManage Mobile application and the new Quick Sync 2 feature. OpenManage Enterprise also offers management of rack and modular solutions via a single interface.

With PowerEdge MX designed for flexible customisation, Dell EMC’s end-to-end support and deployment services range from delivery of a fully integrated modular solution to customised deployment and configuration to meet individual customer needs. Services also include ProSupport Plus¹, which offers around the clock support, direct access to senior ProSupport Plus engineers and a designated Technology Service Manager for full system support.