New converged solutions build on a legacy of Dell-Intel innovation

Ed. Note: This post was authored by Shannon Poulin, vice president of the Intel Data Center Group and general manager of the Intel Enterprise IT Solutions Group.

Dell and Intel continue to build on a legacy of innovative and industry-defining technologies with the announcement of Dell converged infrastructure solutions based on the new Intel Xeon Processor E5 v3 family. This is yet another example of how our companies have come together to deliver leading-edge products for the next-generation data center.

The new Dell PowerEdge FX2 is a natural complement to the Intel Xeon E5v3-based Dell PowerEdge rack servers, which have been in the market since September 2014.

With this most recent announcement, Dell and Intel continue to offer one of the most comprehensive server portfolios in the industry. This line of servers is designed to take advantage of a wide range of advances in the Intel platform.

These advances begin with the Intel Xeon Processor E5 v3 family, which delivers more cores with more cache while using less power, and continue all the way to our latest low-power multicore Atom processor C2000 family. This breadth of Intel Xeon E5v3-based solutions delivers on the promise of the Intel microarchitecture to drive benefits in performance, efficiency, security, and more.

The new Dell servers take a big step forward with the Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 2.0 (Intel AVX2) feature, which increases performance by up to 1.9x (i, ii). Among other gains, Intel AVX2 accelerates floating point operations used in technical computing applications, improves compute-intensive performance, and accelerates integer vector operations used by storage workloads.

This latest line of Dell PowerEdge 13G servers also takes advantages of the new Cache QoS Monitoring feature in the Intel platform. This innovation helps system administrators deliver a better virtualization and cloud experience by providing administrators with the insights they need to ward off resource-contention issues in cloud environments. In more specific terms, the feature identifies “noisy neighbors,” or virtual machines that consume a large amount of the shared resources within a system and cause the performance of other VMs to suffer.

At the management layer, Dell Open Power Management Center leverages the power monitoring, management, and reporting capabilities of Intel Datacenter Manager and Intel Node Manager to bring increased levels of efficiency to the data center.

Such is the power of the close collaborative work among engineers at Dell and Intel. Together, we’re delivering the technologies necessary to transform enterprise data centers to meet the evolving demands of the business in the era of cloud computing, big data, and mobility.

Whether it’s new Intel AVX2 extensions that drive increased performance, faster encryption to better protect sensitive data, or innovations that accelerate networking speeds, Intel and Dell are working to keep today’s data centers at the leading edge of the technology curve.

Shannon Poulin is vice president of the Intel Data Center Group and general manager of the Intel Enterprise IT Solutions Group.



[i] Source as of August 2014 TR#3034 on Linpack*. Baseline configuration: Intel® Server Board S2600CP with two Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2697 v2, Intel® HT Technology disabled, Intel® Turbo Boost Technology enabled, 8x8GB DDR3-1866, RHEL* 6.3, Intel® MKL 11.0.5, score: 528 GFlops. New configuration: Intel® Server System R2208WTTYS with two Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2699 v3, Intel® HT Technology disabled, Intel® Turbo Boost Technology enabled, 8x16GB DDR4-2133, RHEL* 6.4, Intel® MKL 11.1.1, score: 1,012 GFlops.

[ii] Software and workloads used in performance tests may have been optimized for performance only on Intel® microprocessors. Performance tests, such as SYSmark and MobileMark, are measured using specific computer systems, components, software, operations and functions. Any change to any of those factors may cause the results to vary. You should consult other information and performance tests to assist you in fully evaluating your contemplated purchases, including the performance of that product when combined with other products. 

Sarah Vela

About the Author: Sarah Vela

Sarah Vela is no longer with Dell Technologies.