Last week, we achieved yet another milestone in enterprise computing with the launch of our latest enterprise solutions - including our 11th generation PowerEdge servers, a new EqualLogic storage product, and new systems management capabilities. These offerings are specifically designed to help our customers become more efficient and maximize their return on investment in data centers. As part of this launch, we introduced 14 new enterprise products that help customers cut cost and complexity through simplified management, industry leading virtualization and innovative solutions. Two members of our executive leadership team, Steve Schuckenbrock, President, Large Enterprise, and Brad Anderson, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Product Group presented at the launch event in San Francisco on March 25th.
In today's discussion, I am going to focus on our blade servers. Data centers today have faced increasing challenges as they have grown. The sprawl of many servers, plus the resulting challenges to power and cooling, has dramatically increased the role of blade servers. According to industry research firm IDC, in calendar Q4 of 2008, blades made up roughly 15% of the x86 server market by volume and Dell was ranked #3 worldwide with 9% market share. Per IDC, we grew our blade units by roughly four times the industry growth rate in calendar Q4 of 2008. IDC also projects that blades are expected to experience strong growth in the mid-twenty percent range from 2010-12.
With our M-series blades, the goal from the beginning was to design the most power efficient server enclosure in the world. Another driving force in data centers today is virtualization. Blades fit perfectly in a virtual environment as they take up less space than normal rack mount servers and together with virtualization, provide customers a physical and virtual consolidation to save data center space and ease management. Dell provides industry leading solutions for customers running virtualization. Our ability to boot directly to VMware software is also a key differentiator for us. Dell's virtualization servers provide 50% more DIMM slots in the M905 than any competitive four socket server and 33% more high speed I/O.
So how competitive are our blades? We hired a third party firm to run the exact same server configurations and benchmarks on Dell, IBM, and HP blade enclosures. The result showed that our existing M-series blades had up to a 19% power advantage, and up to a 12% performance advantage, over our nearest competitors. Last week, we announced some further enhancements to our M-series blade portfolio - our new blade architecture now has 27 percent lower acquisition cost and delivers 17 percent lower TCO (total cost of ownership) over 5 years per rack compared to HP's c-Class.
So from a competitive standpoint, we are very well positioned in the blade market space and we are the only vendor to provide fully modular switches allowing customers to grow their blade enclosure throughput as their data center needs grow. With our M-series blades, we also offer FlexAddress, which is a low cost way to keep the server's Ethernet or Fibre Channel connection when changing a blade. This can help reduce customer downtime and works with any switch infrastructure a customer uses today. Designed to solve the major challenges of any data center, our M-series blades can be the ideal way to unlock the optimal data center within a customer environment by maximizing the power, cooling, and consolidation needs of today and tomorrow.
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