Blade

In most cases, electronics and liquids do not mix. We’ve all had incidents that prove this. I’ve knocked over a glass of wine on my keyboard. It died, but I like to think it died happy with a belly full of Bordeaux. When my toddler ran into a pool I dove after him with my smart phone in my pocket. I wasn’t able to call home to complain about that one. I’ve clung to my digital camera with a death grip for fear that one unexpected toss of the boat would cast thousands of memories in the form of digital images from the palm of my hand to the bottom of the ocean floor.

But, sometimes putting electronics out to sea is the best thing you can do for your business. Geotrace, a leading seismic processing and imaging company based in Houston, packed the power of a data center into the hull of a ship to speed oil and gas exploration. The Geowave Endeavor, the ship that Geotrace deploys for 3D Seismic production, has a Dell PowerEdge M-series blade server high performance computing cluster on board. They have sixteen a fully-loaded Dell M1000e blade chassis that house a total of 256 Dell M600 blade servers networked with Dell PowerConnect M6220 Ethernet switches. Now that’s a boat load of servers.

I had a chance to catch up with Matt Gaskamp, Geotrace’s data center operations manager, briefly last week. He explained that having the ability to analyze and process information while off shore has given his company a significant edge over the competition. Previously, data collected while at sea could not be processed until the ship returned to shore. Now, Dell blade servers and workstations, software, and services allow Geotrace engineers to analyze the data as soon as it is gathered offshore, which has eliminated at minimum two months of wait time for its customers.

Energy efficiency is a concern with any data center, but it is especially important when it’s all housed on a ship. Geotrace uses Dell Remote Access Controllers and Dell OpenManage software to manage the blades remotely. It has power management tools that let their administrators easily configure maximum power thresholds by server or server group. To increase the energy efficiency of the servers while at sea Geotrace administrators can reset peak observed watts/amps and cumulative power, regulate and manage the fixed power supply aboard the ship.

The folks at Geotrace were kind enough to supply us with images of the Geowave Endeavor and the HPC cluster aboard the Endeavor, which is currently off the coast of Libya. You can view other images of the installation at Dell's Flickr pool. We also have a full case study on the Geotrace HPCC implementation if you'd like to read more.

On this blog, we've posted a lot on the benefits of virtualization. But, some skepticism still remains in part to the myth that blades are not as powerful as conventional servers, and therefore not a good platform for virtualization. In reality, Dell offers blade servers designed with virtualization in mind.

When blades were first introduced, they were mostly designed as low-power Web servers in a more dense form factor. They were built with low-speed, single CPU chips. Today, blades are available with all the same options as rack servers, with multiple CPUs, multicore, and lots of memory. They are now the functional clones of rack servers in terms of processors and memory configuration options.

If you are going through consolidation planning… and you have the option of choosing new server hardware, blades today offer the same CPUs, socket counts and memory as rack servers, including chips with virtualization assist.

Click here to read the entire E-Guide from which these posts were taken, and read more about virtualization on InsideIT.

There have been several recent posts in this blog about the new viability of blade servers for virtualization.

Dell believes that virtualization should be simple, so we’ve designed our systems from the ground up for virtualization performance. We specifically designed our PowerEdge servers to take advantage of the virtualization features AMD has built into its chips, like the new Quad Core AMD Opteron processor, code-named Shanghai. That close collaboration has paid off with record-breaking virtualization performance for the PowerEdge R905, R805, M905 and M805, plus a design that simplifies virtualization for our customers. Check out our VMmark Scores – PowerEdge with AMD holds no. 1 spots for two- and four-socket systems!

The point is, “Simplify and Save” isn’t just a slogan here at Dell. We’re deeply involved with technology – down to the chip level – to make it a reality.

Here’s a link where you can find more information on our new PowerEdge servers and blades. You can check out details on AMD’s new processor here.

It’s hard to imagine a product category that fits the mantra of “Simplify and Save” better than blade servers. And now, with new, third generation technology, they make more sense than ever – even for companies that operate as few as six servers.

The ideas behind the first generation of blade servers make obvious sense. With blades, you deal with fewer racks, which means you get better use of limited data center floor space. (You may even be able to put off building a new data center - at an average cost of over $1000 per square foot!) With blades, you also deal with fewer chassis, which means you reduce extra connections while maintaining redundancy - making management easier. And finally, blades eliminate a lot of cable sprawl issues, and can save significant money with port aggregation.

The third generation of blade servers, as represented by our industry-leading PowerEdge M-Series Blades, make even more sense. In a word, we’ve simplified.

For starters, M-Series blades come pre-assembled right out of the box. With FlexIO, customers get flexibility allowing them to scale with I/O demands without creating change in network infrastructure. Additionally, FlexAddress limits downtime by maintaining persistence of network identity and easily integrates with existing network management tools.

Those are some examples of the “simplify” part of the equation. The “save” part is just as compelling, with dramatic improvements in performance per watt. Our M-Series blades consume up to 19% less power and get up to 25% better performance per watt than other blade systems on the market. So if you’re concerned about rising energy costs, blade servers can certainly be part of the solution.

Ziff-Davis just released a terrific new eSeminar on second generation blade servers, with plenty of detail. Whether you’re running 6 stand-alone servers or 6,000, it’s worth watching.

(editor's note - this post comes to us courtesy of Tim Sherbak, one of our virtualization gurus)

The VMworld show is next week in Las Vegas and we'll be there in a big way.  We'll be there to show solutions highlighting data protection, disaster recovery, consolidation, virtual desktops, and systems management.  We’ve got a series of live demos in the booth including a full VMware environment built from our new blade and rack servers and the new Dell EqualLogic PS5500E.  We’ll be demonstrating VMware Site Recovery Manager as well as the new Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware Edition, Blade Server Management, Chassis System Controller and our OpenManage system management tools. 

In addition, we’ve got some exceptionally innovative technology demos that VMware and Dell engineering have put together. 

Some of the new products we'll have there include the new quad core M905* blade and 4 socket 6 core R900* rack Power Edge servers, Dell EqualLogic PS5500E, Auto-Snapshot Manager/VMware Edition, our integration with VMware’s Site Recovery Manager, the Dell | EMC CX4, our on-demand desktop streaming (ODDS) and virtual remote desktop (VRD) solutions.   We’re even raffling off a couple of new Dell Latitude E laptops to some lucky attendees. 

Here’s a few of the breakout sessions that Dell is participating in or contributed content to and gives you an idea of some of the areas of our focus and energy.

• Dell Keynote Presentation: The Intelligent, Automated IT Infrastructure (KNDell)
• Managing Power and Cooling with Virtualization (PO2514)
• Server and Storage Sizing Best Practices for VMware VDI (VD2505)
• Planning and Implementing Simple, Affordable, Automated Disaster Recovery Through Dell | Virtualization Solution (BC2512)
• Operational Readiness – Truth and Fiction (PO2535)
• Fulfilling Regulatory Requirements in the Healthcare Industry Using VMware Virtualized Infrastructure (BC2411)
• VM-Aware Storage: A Blueprint for VMware Infrastructure Integration with Storage Hardware (TA1465)

A couple of interesting notes on a few of these breakout sessions. 

· John Joseph is providing our keynote presentation.  As you may or may not know, John comes to Dell as a part of the EqualLogic acquisition and has been fully involved in the virtualization market and intimately tied in to EqualLogic’s VMware partnership over the past several years.

· BC2411 is being delivered by Donald Wilkins of Navicure Inc. highlighting his virtualized environment built on Dell equipment and his experience in being one of the first to deploy VMware Site Recovery Manager.  For more on his implementation, check out our case study.

· TA1465 is being presented by Scott Davis, from VMware’s CTO office and reflects upon some interesting developments underway to optimize the integration of VMware and SANs (and smartly ties into the technology demos we’re demonstrating at the Dell booth – more on that later).

· VD2505 reflects upon a joint engineering project between VMware and Dell to analyze and understand infrastructure sizing requirements for virtual desktop workloads (a sneak peak of this presentation was just broadcast over the web. See it here. More than 700 people have signed up for the breakout session!  Virtual desktops are the new hotness.

· BC2512 is effectively a free hour of disaster recovery consulting from our Dell professional services group that also details implementing VMware Site Recovery Manager as a disaster recovery solution.

Also, be sure to check out the Akorri booth (#1314) where they will have a “Live” demo of Akorri BalancePoint managing multiple VMs in an ESX cluster running on Dell PowerEdge servers with Dell EqualLogic storage. It’s a great example of a Dell virtualized data center in a box.

And of course we’ll have a whole slew of virtualization experts on hand to consult with VMworld attendees. In fact, there will be presentations on a variety of topics all day long right in our booth. We'll also have people from our PartnerDirect program on hand for those interested in our channel program.

So please stop by the Dell booth (#1000).  You can’t miss it.  It looks like this:

And if you can’t make it to the show, our TechCenter has put up a Dell site at the VMworld virtual exhibitor booth so keep tabs on us there.

* These generations of servers were specifically engineered from the ground up with virtualized environments in mind and they hit the mark.  We just released VMmark scores for the M905 and R900 configurations and they are smoking!