Dell Makes Business Case With Servers, Networking, Storage

by Jeffrey Burt

Underneath the display here is the Dell data center technology running everything else on show floor.

The racks are holding everything from PowerEdge blade servers and Compellent storage appliances to SonicWall network security systems to products running Eucalyptus private cloud—everything needed to keep the show floor humming.

The 2U (3.5-inch) rack system is powered by four Xeon E5-4600 chips, offering a lot of processing power and 2.5MB of cache per core.

Dell’s PowerEdge VRTX is aimed at SMBs and remote and branch offices of enterprises, with flexible shared storage, integrated networking and simple management capabilities.

Dell Networking’s N-Series switches are among several new networking offerings the company announced at Dell World. The N-Series is designed to be power- and cost-efficient, with both 1 Gigabit Ethernet and 10GbE switches for campus network infrastructures.

The company also had its S6000 (left) and S5000 switches on display. The S6000, which launched in the third quarter, is designed for cloud data center environments that are highly virtualized and run such workloads as big data and virtual desktop infrastructures.

Dell’s MD3 creates dynamic pools of disk storage and offer organizations several options, including 1GbE and 10GbE iSCSI arrays for virtualized environments. There also are options for high-performance, high-capacity and high-bandwidth applications.

The Translational Genomics Research Institute—TGen—is using Dell cloud computing technology to bring more processing power to its research. TGen says a child holds about 30TB of genomic data, enough to fill about 30 million books. Dell’s technology improved the institute’s sequencing and analysis capabilities by 1,200 percent, bringing enough power to reduce processing jobs from months to days.

Michael Dell has said that PCs will continue to play an important role in the company’s enterprise efforts. Among the systems on the show floor were the company’s Latitude 5000 laptops, which offer 14- and 15.6-inch touch-enabled displays.

Dell’s Latitude E6430 is a ruggedized notebook that includes advanced hard drive protection and a Tri-Metal chassis.

Among the Dell customers on hand was the JTG Daugherty Racing Team, which brought along this race car. The group uses the vendor’s ruggedized PCs to collect, analyze and share data about the car’s performance in real time.

The chip maker demonstrated the strength of its solid-state drives (SSDs) by running its DC S3700 Series in an OptiPlex 990 desktop system.

The companies showed off a Wyse D Class thin client running on Advanced Micro Devices’ embedded G-Series accelerated processing unit (APU).

Logitech had on display a range of keyboards and mice that run with Dell computers.

There was no shortage of food and drink on the show floor, and attendees could go to this wall of doughnuts and choose from glazed, sprinkled and chocolate varieties.