Dell EMC has officially launched their first wave of PowerEdge 14G servers in line with the release of Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. The combination of Intel's enhancements and Dell EMC's PowerEdge servers are a leap forward in terms of performance and features. As with previous generational releases, these are done in waves. Wave one consists of some of the most common platforms and form factors.

What does this mean compared to the current portfolio?

The Dell EMC portfolio is upping its game with the introduction of 14G. The new portfolio will benefit from scalable business architecture, intelligent automation and integrated security. On top of this, performance improvement boasts a 26% increase in processing cores and a 50% increase in bandwidth over previous generations.

Playing the BOSS Card

As part of the revision of models, persistent memory (NVDIMM) retains its contents – pull the plug on electrical power and it still remembers. The way in which memory is accessed offers an excellent way to increase database performance. There's also an optional Boot Optimized Storage Subsystem (BOSS card) which uses internal M.2 SSDs for boot and frees up your storage space for other tasks - a vital commodity for Software Defined Storage and Hyper-Converged Infrastructure.

Looking back at previous models, 14G has six times the number of NVMe drives in a single server and the NVMe capacity is much larger. This increases application performance and response time – freeing your time to focus on core development.

Model Updates

Dell EMC's new portfolio includes a fair few updates that offer a range of advantages for different organisations. These include:

• Dual-socket: R640 – 1RU – This is an Ideal platform for dense scale-out data centre computing and storage
• Dual-socket: R740 – 2RU – Offering a general purpose workhorse with superior configuration flexibility
• Dual-Socket: R740xd – 2RU – This is heavy on storage and provides a platform for high-performance, software-defined storage.
• Four-socket: R940 – 3RU – A mighty powerhouse, this is well placed for large, scale-up analytics
• Four Dual-socket servers in 2RU: C6420 – Utilise this for higher performance hyper-scale workloads

Server Management

Dell EMC is renowned for their server management platform and the release of 14G servers wouldn't be complete without an updated platform. iDRAC 9, powered by a new dual-core ARM processor, will offer numerous feature enhancements such as a new HTML5 user interface which has been redesigned for speed and simplicity. In addition, support for Redfish (the newly introduced industry standard) increases management security, availability of server configuration profiles and visibility of switch port connections, enabling faster deployment.

Is this secure?

The development of 14G PowerEdge is centred around security. Dell EMC PowerEdge 14G servers are designed as part of a cyber resilient architecture, integrating security into the full server lifecycle. Dell EMC's insistence on a secure component supply chain ensures protection from factory to the data centre; the units are secure from inception. Once active, cryptographically signed firmware packages and Secure Boot run with Server Lockdown feature and prevent unauthorised or malicious changes. Failsafe features such as System Erase allow you to quickly, and securely, wipe all data from storage media including hard drives, SSDs and system memory.

Find out more

If you would like to discuss the 14G server transition and what that will mean for your infrastructure, please contact your Softcat account manager or get in touch using the button below.