Enabling customer choice and flexibility has always been a top priority at Dell, and the way we’ve designed and developed our PowerEdge blade portfolio is no exception. Dell continues to expand and refine our Blade offerings to reflect customer desires and technology adoption trends.
One of these trends is the movement towards 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) solutions as a way to facilitate network unification and consolidation, as well as supporting robust virtualized usage models by enabling greater throughput. With other modern technologies eliminating or reducing roadblocks to virtualization such as processing power and memory capacity, I/O throughput is quickly becoming THE hot topic for deploying virtualization-dense environments.
That’s why we recently upgraded our existing 10Gb Ethernet IO lineup by introducing the first converged networking switch for our M1000e Blade server chassis which allows direct connection to a Fibre Channel SAN Fabric without requiring top-of-rack switch infrastructure—the Dell M8428-k. With the M8428-k, our users receive a single flexible 10Gb Converged Enhanced Ethernet solution that eliminates bottlenecks when deploying virtualized workloads.
Unlike many other CEE/DCB deployment methodologies, our Dell M8428-k deployment can drive down acquisition and technology adoption expenses significantly by diminishing the need for additional top of rack switches with their exceptionally high port costs. This fully featured converged switch gives users one of the most cost effective ways to transition to 10Gb Enhanced Ethernet technology and easily integrates with existing 10GbE Ethernet (10GbE KR CEE-DCB), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Fibre Channel (FC) fabrics. , It protects a customers’ existing data center investments while reducing infrastructure requirements (including adapters, switches, cables and management ports) by up to 50 percent.
Another key feature that the Dell M8428-k brings to the table is flexibility! By leveraging industry-standard technologies such as NPIV, users can seamlessly integrate into any FC SAN fabric; this means they can also work with existing Brocade or Cisco switches, for example, without adding any complexity or management headaches. 
Another prime example of enabling customer flexibility is in how we’ve augmented our Dell Chassis Management Controller (CMC). We’ve added even more powerful functionality to help administrators simply and easily manage blade servers and blade server enclosures. The CMC now allows customers to connect with up to 8 additional Dell M1000e Blades chassis anywhere in the world to be linked and managed through a single, embedded interface. We’ve enabled administrators to perform all of their key monitoring and management tasks such as power cycling, power management, error diagnosis and many others from a single, secure web-browser interface. That’s up to 144 servers in 9 chassis, in one data center or geographically dispersed, effectively managed through one embedded interface without any additional software agents, consoles or hardware infrastructure at all!
We did our homework on our 11G blade portfolio, designing and developing the features and capabilities that our customers truly desire and we’re always encouraging feedback. We want to hear how Dell is making a difference in your IT environment, so let us know.