Dell Unveils Servers for SMBs

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Dell today introduced new servers and storage aimed at the small and medium-sized business (SMB) markets and designed to make ongoing management simpler and less expensive, a perpetual problem for all IT shops. The company also announced plans for its first branded uninterruptible power supplies (UPS).

With maintenance costs eating up as much as 70 percent of IT budgets, according to Dell’s own research, the purchase price of the machine is almost minuscule by comparison. Many of the issues are in software, but Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), a hardware firm, is doing what it can to reduce those expenses.

“Software is a system management issue, which we’ve now embedded on the motherboard,” Sally Stevens, vice president of platform marketing at Dell, told InternetNews.com. “If you think about how to streamline efficiencies, you can do it in design efficiencies like toolless racking or common design.”

So Dell can reduce costs of maintenance by minimizing the changes they make to PC internals, for instance. Another way is the Lifecycle Controller on the motherboard. That controller holds all of the critical drivers and even the operating system. When the hardware is installed, the customer presses a button and the operating system and drivers are set up and configured automatically.

Over the life span of the server, the controller will regularly check for updates, so if there’s a new network controller driver or BIOS (define), it will be downloaded and installed automatically.

PowerEdge, the 11th Generation

Dell is launching the eleventh generation of its PowerEdge starting with the SMB market, introducing many of the features it cites as means to reduce maintenance costs. These servers, powered by Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) newly introduced family of Xeon 3400 processors, have the Lifecycle Controller, easy-access design and toolless design.

The entry-level server is the PowerEdge T110, a tower server with a single Xeon 3400. It’s designed for low-usage scenarios, such as the first server a company might need. Because it also could be used in point-of-sale or other customer-facing scenarios, it’s been designed to be very quiet.

The T310 is its bigger brother, with twice as much memory (32GB versus 16GB) and more room for hard drives. Both servers come in a tower only 18 inches deep, making it ideal for tight spots, and each is certified to run Windows Server 2008 R2, the latest server software from Microsoft.

Article courtesy of InternetNews.com.