New Dell Systems Management Capabilities Bolster Customer Successes for Fast-growing Dell PowerEdge FX2 Modular Infrastructure

Monday 25 July 2016
Claire Vyvyan vice president, enterprise solutions, Dell

Dubai - MENA Herald: Dell today announced updates to the systems management portfolio for the Dell PowerEdge FX2 modular infrastructure to help customers further maximise IT productivity and business continuity. The new features enhance provisioning and infrastructure visibility, plus add support for Nagios users and open source applications.

Dell’s overall blade server growth is bolstered by the PowerEdge FX2, which is significantly outpacing industry blade server growth. The PowerEdge FX2 has demonstrated triple-digit percentage growth year-over-year in unit and revenue over the previous four quarters, contributing substantially to PowerEdge blade server gains, since its launch in 2014.1 According to IDC, Dell PowerEdge blade servers experienced 34 percent year-over-year revenue growth and grew 17 percent faster than the industry in the first quarter of 2016.2

“This latest update to PowerEdge FX2 is an important one,” says Claire Vyvyan vice president, enterprise solutions, Dell. “By offering users an enhanced experience, complete with improved ease of provisioning for virtualized workloads, we can continue to help our customers achieve total data center flexibility and efficiency, without the need for them to totally overhaul their existing data center infrastructure both now and in the future.”

“Our customers are interested in making their IT infrastructure more flexible and efficient to address evolving business and workload demands in real-time.” said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, vice president and general manager, Dell Server Solutions. “With strong systems management capabilities, the PowerEdge FX2 can help customers meet their goals by supporting traditional applications and new workloads driven by social, mobile, analytics and cloud computing in a modular infrastructure. These attributes combined with recent customer successes is driving unprecedented growth.”

Improved Management and Industry Software Integration for Dell PowerEdge FX2
Dell has enhanced its systems management software to take advantage of the unique engineering of the Dell PowerEdge FX2 and is designed to simplify and automate critical hardware management tasks. New capabilities and updates enhance the user experience with improved ease of provisioning for virtualized workloads, plug-ins for Nagios users, and comprehensive infrastructure visibility and flexibility to run open source applications. This includes:
Dell OpenManage Essentials 2.2 enables fast provisioning of I/O aggregators with template-based processes that easily and uniformly replicate the assignment of vLANs during the blade port mapping process, which ensures simplicity and accuracy in network set-up. The new geographic view feature enables quick, easy location access to PowerEdge FX2 systems onsite or across the globe with manageability across 5500 devices. Additionally, seamless integration with SupportAssist3 provides proactive, predictive support and automated case creation to resolve hardware issues up to 90% faster with ProSupport Plus4
The new OpenManage plug-in for Nagios XI 1.0 extracts detailed PowerEdge FX2 infrastructure information from the Dell Chassis Management Controller and server embedded intelligence, iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller, delivering a unified set of alerts and health monitoring details to Nagios XI administrators. As a result, customers can continue using their Nagios XI console to monitor Dell hardware without additional tools or training while achieving a higher return on their investment.
New Active System Manager (ASM) 8.2 capabilities enable fast and easy on-boarding and deployment of IT services across multiple chassis, server, storage and networking devices. The port view provides a visual mapping of physical and virtual infrastructures and any connectivity issues to allow for quick troubleshooting to help IT teams maintain business continuity and deliver more consistent, reliable IT services. Additionally, a new software developer kit (SDK) simplifies creating and deploying complex applications using readily available open source modules.

Customers and Partners Choose PowerEdge FX2 to Revolutionise Data Centers
With the Dell PowerEdge FX2 and Dell system management software, customers across 70 countries are taking advantage of the integrated building blocks of servers, storage and networking that help them achieve data center flexibility and efficiency without having to overhaul their existing infrastructure. Customers range from film production studios and factory automation specialists to healthcare organisations to schools. For example, Clayton Public Schools, in New Jersey, wanted to support new district IT initiatives and eliminate application performance issues by upgrading its IT infrastructure to a Dell PowerEdge FX2 server enclosure with Dell PowerEdge FC630 servers. With access to a new IT infrastructure based on a modular 2U converged platform that provides quick performance, the district can stream HD video and digital learning tools, so students and teachers are allowed more time for creativity and learning.

“Even though we’re a small school district, we’re now running an enterprise-level infrastructure here because of the Dell solution, which means we can give our students and teachers the tools they need to spark their creativity and prepare for the workforce,” said Dan Marakowski, technology coordinator at Clayton Public Schools. “With the Dell FX2, we are seeing a 50 percent time savings on IT administration because of our consolidated environment and the increased performance and reliability we get with the Dell technologies.”

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