Three years ago our team in Dell OEM Solutions made the strategic decision to enter the OEM COTS Telecommunications market. We had been getting significant interest from our customers and those who wanted to be our customers to add features and capabilities to our standard product offering to better fit into the market. So, we embarked on a mission to make modifications OEM’s most popular enterprise products based on our customers request to support the Telco market. This meant hardening those platforms to fully pass the NEBS Level 3 and ETSI certification process. The initial result of those three years of work was launched this past May in the form of the PowerEdge R620 t and R720 t, 1U & 2U rack mount servers, respectively.
Here’s a video overview from Zac Cravens, the lead mechanical engineer for Dell’s Telco Products:
Carrier Grade Blades
Today I am excited to be writing about the next platform to get the Telco treatment, the super-efficient Dell PowerEdge Blade platform. With the launch of the PowerEdge M620 t blade server running Intel’s XEON E5-2600 series CPUs, Dell OEM Solutions can offer a complete line of x86 enterprise platforms with compliance with the NEBS Level 3 and ETSI specifications (test report summaries are available on request). Along with the M620 t blade, the accompanying chassis, the PowerEdge M1000e t, is also being launched with NEBS Level 3 and ETSI compliance. This assures our OEM customers the ability to utilize the dense and efficient enterprise x86 blade solution Dell has been building for many years for both standard data centers and central offices.
What I find really compelling is the leveraged aspect of these products. We didn’t go off and develop entirely new solutions in order to have a product to offer our OEM Telco customers. Instead we worked with our existing platforms and made the modifications necessary to comply with the Telco standards our customers require. The platforms are fully software compatible with our standard products. By working with us, the software development and testing performed on standard versions of these servers won’t need to be repeated for the Carrier Grade versions demanded by the Carriers and Service Providersin certain installations. Everyone gets to leverage their work and accomplish more with their precious resources.
Carrier Grade Storage
We are also excited to announce pending availability of Carrier Grade versions of Dell’s PowerVault MD1200 t and MD1220 t JBOD storage arrayswith 3.5” hard drives and 2.5” hard drives, respectively. These will expand the storage capacity of the server platforms we have been shipping to customers since May, 2012.
In addition to the JBOD chassis, Dell OEM Solutions is also going to start shipping Carrier Grade versions of commonly requested RAID enclosures, the fibre-channel PowerVault MD3600f t and MD3620f t and the iSCSI PowerVault MD3600i t and MD3620i t. These popular RAID enclosures offer amazing value for mainstream storage applications where the end solutions need to be optimized for performance, price, and capacity. Each 3.5” chassis supports up to 12 SAS/Near line SAS hard drives and each 2.5” chassis supports up to 24 SAS hard drives. One can add Carrier Grade PowerVault MD1200 t or 1220 t chassis for a maximum of 120 (or 192 with premium key options) 3.5” SAS/near line hard drives. With the easy to use configuration and management tools provided, these friendly platforms can be deployed as simple SAN solutionsfor any medium sized storage application with great performance and storage management functionality that used to be only available in the mid-market SANs.
All six of these RAID array enclosures comply with the strict NEBS Level 3 and ETSI certification standards (documentation available on request) and are offered from several factories around the world utilizing Dell’s renowned supply chain capabilities, tech support prowess, and reliable performance. Our OEM Solutions sales, support, and engineering teams are prepared to work with our customers to ensure the best components are designed into solutions going into the Telco market.
By offering three server platforms based on the dual socket Intel XEON E5-2600 CPUs along with these easy, effective, and great performing SAN solutions, our OEM Telco customers can build entire solutions based on Dell’s well respected hardware, share development for both standard and carrier grade hardware, and receive quality service and support around the world.
This is a very exciting time for OEM Solutions and our commitment to the Telco enterprise COTS industry shows with the many Carrier Grade products we now offer. Learn more about http://www.dell.com/telco and follow conversation on twitter #Dell4Telco.