Inside Enterprise IT : Blade

Geotrace Set a New World Record for 3D Seismic Production with a Boat Load of PowerEdge Servers

DELL-Matt M — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:42:00 GMT

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.

Blade Server Myth #3 – Virtualization

DELL-Kara K — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:00:00 GMT

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.

Simplify and Save – Down to the Chip Level

DELL-Sally S — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 18:00:00 GMT

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.

Third Generation Blades: More Flexible, More Cost-Effective

armando_acosta — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 04:00:00 GMT

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.

VMworld's Around the Corner - What's Dell Got?

david_graves — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 21:25:00 GMT

(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!

Dell Ups the Ante in Virtualization

bruce_eric_anderson — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

What do you think of this time of year? Kids returning to school? Football season? True, but September is now all about virtualization, literally. With Microsoft’s launch earlier this week of its embedded Hyper-V and VMworld just around the corner in Las Vegas, the timing is just right for Dell to introduce its new virtualization solutions.

And yet, the timing really doesn’t have anything to do with what Dell, Microsoft, VMware and others are announcing. The fact is that the market and our customers are demanding virtualization. Customers have under-utilized servers, power and cooling issues, and are facing increasing energy and facility costs to expand their datacenters to meet the increasing needs of their internal clients. These were some of the discussion points during our earlier virtualization launch in May of this year. During that launch, we introduced the PowerEdge R805 and PowerEdge R905, some of the first servers on the market to be designed specifically for customers looking to virtualize their environments.

According to Yankee Group, approximately 72 percent of businesses affirmed that they have already deployed or plan to deploy virtualization solutions. Now that virtualization is a mainstream technology, the question isn’t “will businesses virtualize?” – the question is “when will businesses virtualize their datacenters?” And then the question all those customers will ask is which company is best positioned to provide the platforms and services to make the rollout a success.

We today issued a five-page news release on the myriad announcements but let me net them out for you here.

The PowerEdge M905 and PowerEdge M805 full-height blades, designed and built from the ground up by Dell engineers to be optimized for virtualization environments. The M905 has taken home top performance numbers in industry standard benchmarks;
Microsoft® Windows Server 2008™ with Hyper-V™ available as a factory-installed option on Dell PowerEdge servers;
Partnerships with PlateSpin and Vizioncore, two virtualization management companies;
Advanced EqualLogic integration across industry hypervisors for simplified data protection, recovery and backup;
The Dell EqualLogic PS5500E offering 24 or 48 terabytes of raw capacity in a 4U array – more than doubling the density and tripling the capacity of previous models;
New services designed to simplify the design, deployment, security and management of virtualized environments including new infrastructure consulting services for Microsoft Hyper-V deployments, site recovery manager services for VMware environments and new lifecycle management services for VMware environments.

As you can see, our approach to virtualization is different from what others are talking about. We're not announcing just hardware or just software or services. We're once again introducing a full suite of hardware (built by Dell engineers from the ground up as virtualization platforms), software and partnerships, and related virtualization services. Our aim is to remove the complexity around virtualization. Good stuff.

Dell FlexAddress PowerEdge M1000e - The Facts

armando_acosta — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 22:39:00 GMT

Recently, one of our competitors misstated a couple of key points about Dell’s FlexAddress and I’d like to take a moment to clarify how easy it is to implement and integrate the virtualization system into existing environments. (To tell you the truth, we're a bit flattered as they also have "real stories" about Sun, IBM and EMC, so we must be doing something right.)

Before I do that, though, I’d like to suggest that all IT companies make their respective technologies easier to understand, which will empower customers to see the facts for what they are and make informed decisions – the true spirit of pure competition.

The Basics: What is FlexAddress

FlexAddress works by locking a server's World Wide Name (WWN for Fibre Channel Fabrics) and Media Access Control (MAC for Ethernet Fabrics) to a blade slot instead of on the blade itself.
By removing the network and storage identity from the server hardware, customers are now able to upgrade and replace components or the entire server without taking the additional steps of changing the identity on the network, which can be very time consuming especially as IT environments become more virtualized.
FlexAddress simplifies how IT departments manage their servers and limits any downtime caused by maintenance or upgrading in the datacenter. This empowers administrators by allowing a server change to not affect the network and storage teams while allowing server administrators to rapidly get their job done. It also seamlessly integrates into the existing server and network administrator management infrastructure.

Implementation: A Different Approach

FlexAddress is enabled through the Chassis Management Controller (CMC) of the PowerEdge M1000e, thus it works with all I/O modules (including Cisco, Brocade, and Dell PowerConnect -- it even works with any pass-through module) and IO Mezzanine cards (including Qlogic, Emulex, and Broadcom).

What makes this different from other blade vendors is that you don’t have to switch your switch. FlexAddress is controlled by the CMC, it doesn’t add a management layer, and seamlessly integrates into the network and server management already used in any datacenter today.

The key takeaway here is the customer can use what they have in place, no need to implement new physical hardware and introduce a new management structure.

The 4 Key Things to Ask: Making an Informed Decision

When I talk to customers, I encourage them to ask us or any other blade provider a couple of questions:

“What does it take to make this feature work?”
“What hardware has to be implemented?”
“Can I manage this feature with the tools I have in place?”
“How much do all these features cost?”

If you don’t get good answers to the above questions, I’d suggest moving to the next blade vendor. I’d also encourage all the companies out there talking up server blades to simplify how you (and we) explain the value of our respective technologies with clear comparisons and solid facts.

Our customers are telling us that they want less hype and more facts to simplify their decisions.

More on Dell's New Server Blades

david_graves — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:34:00 GMT

While you won’t hear us say “blade everything,” you will hear us talk about the virtues of blades and where they make sense for customers. Tom Cloyd and Chad Fenner, who both focus on blade technologies for Dell, chat in this vlog about Dell’s new PowerEdge M805 and PowerEdge M905 server blades.

(Please visit the site to view this media)