An impressive blade server system that can match anything from HP and IBM
After a couple of false starts, Dell appears finally to have a blade server platform to rival those from HP and IBM. Moreover, in the past few months, Dell has extended its M-Series Blade Server family, adding yet more server options plus flexible new I/O modules developed in conjunction with Cisco and Brocade.
Dell has also updated its management interface, and with the offer of exclusive access to Dell’s proof-of-concept lab in Ireland, we thought it time to investigate exactly what the M-Series is all about.
The first thing we learned was that the ’M’ in M-Series stands for modular, with a single 10U chassis - the PowerEdge M1000e - at the heart of the product.
Capable of accommodating all of the current M-Series blades and future additions for at least the next few years, it’s a compact and very smart piece of kit. Built to the usual Dell high standards it has room for eight full-height blades, or 16 half-height servers for customers wanting maximum processor density.
Double-width blades with extra storage are also due out later this year, and Dell said it will be possible to mix different format blades to suit requirements.
The blades plug into the chassis from the front into a passive single-board mid-plane. With no electronics to go wrong, this makes for a very robust and reliable arrangement. Moreover, the Dell engineers were at pains to point out the use of female connectors on the mid-plane and male on the blades so that, if a pin gets damaged, it affects only that single blade rather than the entire mid-plane.
The mid-plane, in turn, connects the blades to power, a plug-in management controller and a variety of I/O modules, about which more shortly.
The blades come in a range of specifications to suit every application from simple web server farms, through scalable virtualisation to high-end application and cloud hosting. Intel-and AMD-based blades are both available, and the PowerEdge M610 (from £1,837 ex VAT) is a popular choice across a wide range of applications and a typical starting point for many deployments.
