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Dell is rounding out its 13th generation PowerEdge server portfolio with new single-socket rack and tower systems aimed at smaller businesses and remote offices.
The company is bringing better performance and manageability to the four new systems through such features as the latest Intel processors, DDR4 memory and OpenManage software that officials said will make it easier for users to deploy and run the systems.
Such capabilities are important for the growing number of small to midsize businesses (SMBs) that have similar needs as larger companies but fewer IT and financial resources, according to Brian Payne, executive director of Dell’s Server Solutions unit.
“The common thread is that they’re really led by people focused on their business and on serving customers and are not particularly interested in their IT,” Payne told eWEEK. “They don’t want to be an IT department.”
They’re looking for systems that will help them run their applications faster and that enable them to grow their capabilities as their needs grow, he said. At the same time, SMBs need simplified solutions that are easy to get up and running, performance that can drive their business, and features that enable them to more easily deploy and manage the infrastructure.
Dell is addressing such demands with the latest 13th generation PowerEdge servers, which Payne said will complete the lineup refresh that began last year. Included among the new systems are two rack servers, the PowerEdge R330 and R230. The R330 is aimed at small businesses, remote offices of larger companies and OEM customers. It provides up to 56 percent more internal storage capacity than its predecessor.
The R230 has twice the memory capacity, three times the maximum internal storage capacity and twice the I/O expansion of the previous system.
The PowerEdge T330 is a rackable tower server targeting SMBs, departments and remote offices that offers up to four DDR4 memory slots and up to eight 3.5-inch hard drives, while the T130 is designed for small offices and home offices, with twice the memory capacity of its predecessor.
All the systems, which are available now, come with chips from Intel’s Xeon E3-1200 v5 product line, DDR4 memory—which offers 33 percent faster memory performance than DDR3—PCIe Gen 3.0 slots for faster I/O and twice the IOPS (input/output operations per second) performance via Dell’s PERC9 RAID controller. In addition, the T130 is the first entry-level server from Dell to feature OpenManage tools, which officials said can help reduce deployment time by as much as 40 percent when compared with an equivalent server from Hewlett Packard Enterprise and make management easier. It also offers 92 percent faster firmware updates and 97 percent faster configuration time.
Customers also can take advantage of Dell’s ProDeploy suite of capabilities to make it easier to get the systems running and can come with training and certification.
The new systems play to Dell’s strength in the important SMB space, where the company is the top vendor of single-socket rack systems, and No. 2 in one-socket tower servers, Payne said. Most of the competition in this market comes from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Lenovo, though white-box makers also have a presence.
There are more than 125 million such businesses in the world, 71 percent of which are in emerging markets like China, India and Brazil. In the United States, there are 28 million small businesses, about 75 percent of which are what Dell calls non-employer firms—where people are self-employed and have no other employees. The SMBs also have some staying power—70 percent of new employer companies are still in business after two years; 33 percent are still in business after 10 years.
In the European Union, there are more than 20 million SMBs, making up 99 percent of all EU business. Ninety percent of these businesses have fewer than 10 employees.