theCUBE Live at Dell World 2014 Michael Dell

In a message to the market that a grueling leveraged buyout hasn’t dampened its innovative spirit, Dell Inc. used its Dell World 2014 conference today to roll out a range of server and storage products aimed at both corporate and small business customers.

The new products include a Dell PowerEdge FX server enclosure that packs six server, storage and network sleds into a 2U space with integrated management capabilities. The device is designed for enterprises that want to move to software-defined virtual environments without massive disruption, said Brian Payne, senior product planning manager for Dell’s PowerEdge server portfolio.

Next-gen convergence

Payne said the FX2 is “not a rack, not a blade, but the next generation of convergence.” It’s designed to address the shortcomings of both blade and rack servers. For blade servers, those weaknesses include poor support for direct access storage devices, poor economics for small incremental purchases and lack of PCI flexibility. For rack servers, shortcomings are space requirements, lack of cable aggregation and poor power and cooling efficiency.

In contrast, the PowerEdge FX2 is a fully converged enclosure with shared power, cooling, management and PCI connectivity that can flexibly support a variety of server, storage and networking modules. It’s back-ended by an “IO Aggregator” that supports both PCI and Ethernet, permitting customers to easily migrate from local to shared virtualized storage. Each FX2 rack can accommodate four FC630 server nodes, and up to 80 nodes can be packed into a rack and managed from a single console. That means a smaller footprint and more efficient power and cooling, the company said.

Payne said the new server is intended to address the “tremendous inertia with existing infrastructure” that holds companies back from transitioning to a fully software-defined environment. Users can run the FX2 like a conventional rack server until ready to virtualize, at which point they can “aggregate the IO and plug into a SAN,” Payne said. “That very nicely migrates to a fully virtualized solution.”

Components of the enclosure will roll out in stages between now and the middle of next year. Pricing wasn’t specified.

Cheaper flash

Dell is also bidding for a bigger piece of the low end of the flash storage market with a new array that’s half the price of its current entry-level model. The Dell Storage SC4020 Entry-Level All-Flash configuration is priced at $25,000 for a unit with six 480GB read-intensive solid-state devices, or less than nine dollars per gigabyte. Users can also swap in write-intensive flash modules as well as spinning disks, a combination that Dell said it was first to bring to market. “Ninety-eight percent of customers are deploying flash in a tiered network,” said Travis Vigil, executive director of Dell Storage. “Flash prices are continuing to come down, but we believe that for foreseeable future the ability to tier will be critical.”

There’s storage news for enterprise customers as well in the form of the Dell Storage PS4210 Series enterprise storage arrays that boost performance six-fold compared to their predecessors and provide advanced connectivity options for entry-level primary storage and critical workloads. The PS4210 is the first hybrid (flash and disk) model in Dell’s entry-level PS Series portfolio, which is aimed at virtualized datacenters and remote offices. The iSCSI arrays come in five models with a more powerful controller and double the cache memory as well as twice the number of ports compared to the previous generation. Vigil called it “a complete refresh” of the product line.

Finally, Dell rolled out its latest entry in the red-hot hyper-converged appliance market with a series of devices that combine compute, storage, hypervisor and a virtualized compute platform into a single offering. What’s unique about the Dell XC Series of Web-scale Converged Appliances approach is the storage virtualization and management software provided by Nutanix, Inc., with whom Dell announced a partnership in June. The Nutanix hypervisor enables users to mix and match appliances with storage virtualized across the arrays. “You can run any hypervisor and Nutanix virtualizes storage. It’s managed as a single brick that combines hypervisor and storage in an X86 server,” he said.

Each appliance feature integrates server and storage resources, software-defined management, server-attached flash, scale-out expansion and hybrid design with a unified data fabric supporting industry-standard hypervisors and clouds. The new appliances are available in five models for different workloads large database management and sporting between 400GB and 3.2TB of flash storage. The units have been authorized by VMware, Inc. and Citrix Systems, Inc. for use in virtual desktop scenarios. Pricing wasn’t announced.