From AMD EPYC processors to Nvidia A100 GPUs, here are five features inside Dell EMC’s new PowerEdge XE8545 server that you need to know about.

Dell EMC Launches PowerEdge XE8545

Dell EMC took the wraps off its new PowerEdge XE8545 server today, that uniquely combines AMD and Nvidia technology with the company’s high-end server line.

“The Dell EMC PowerEdge XE8545 is a brand-new and incredibly powerful server that simplifies artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure in your data center,” said Ravi Pendekanti, senior vice president of server solutions product management and marketing at Dell EMC in a blog post today. “These servers don’t just power your data center, they’re designed to help you innovate, adapt and grow well into the future.”

The PowerEdge XE8545 is designed for accelerated workloads and ideal for machine learning, HPC and GPU virtualization.

Here are the five key features in Dell EMC’s new PowerEdge server that you need to know about.

AMD And Nvidia

The new PowerEdge XE8545 server combines the maximum core counts of two 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors with four of the highest performing NVIDIA A100 GPUs.

PowerEdge XE8545 offers up to 128 cores of Milan CPUs, four Nvidia A100 GPUs, and optimized performance of Nvidia‘s vGPU software in a dual socket, 4U rack server.

“It is designed specifically for accelerated workloads, which make it ideal for cutting-edge machine learning models, complex high-performance computing and GPU virtualization,” said Dell EMC’s Pendekanti.

Dell EMC said other key capabilities of the PowerEdge XE8545 includes optimized CPU to GPU performance and accelerated I/O throughput.

NVMe And PCIe Gen 4

Dell EMC says it’s increased the speed of storage with NVMe and reduced data latency with PCIe to accelerate I/O throughput, which prevents performance bottlenecks when organizations are executing on large data sets. Dell was able to do this by adopting PCIe Gen4 NVMe.

“These components help you take full advantage of the server’s compute power by keeping the data close to the processing,” said Dell EMC’s Pendekanti.

Dell’s PowerEdge XE server line is purpose-built for complex, emerging workloads that require high performance and large storage which is why NVMe is critical. The server delivers the reliability and security for demanding applications inside traditional data centers or in extreme conditions stretching from outside the data center to the harsh edge environment of the IT infrastructure.

Nvidia NVLink Included

The PowerEdge XE8545 is one of the first servers on the market to have the new Nvidia NVLink baseboard with Nvidia’s A100 chips in it.

Nvidia NVLink is a high-speed, direct GPU-to-GPU interconnect that offers a significantly faster alternative for multi-GPU systems compared to traditional PCIe-based solutions, according to Nvidia.

“For example, you can boost A100 machine learning inferencing with 1.46X more images per second per GPU within the PowerEdge XE8545.1,” said Dell EMC’s Pendekanti.

Air Cooled

The PowerEdge XE8545 is completely air cooled for greater efficiency and lower cost of operation, Dell said. Being air cooled avoids the need of incorporating extra piping to accommodate for liquid cooling.

“While AI infrastructure is loaded with performance features, it also has a reputation for being difficult to deploy and manage. We’ve remedied these concerns with a server design and management features that radically simplify your experience,” Dell EMC’s Pendekanti said. “You can analyze more than 150k images per second, leveraging 2x AMD Milan CPU and 4x NVIDIA A100 SXM4 500W GPU, all with standard air cooling in the PowerEdge XE854.”

Additionally, the new PowerEdge XE8545 is a 4U standard-depth rack server, meaning it easily fits into existing data centers.

Includes iDRAC and OpenManage Enterprise

The PowerEdge XE8545 server includes iDRAC [Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller] compliance, designed for secure local and remote server management that helps IT administrators deploy, update and monitor PowerEdge serves anywhere.

The server also includes Dell EMC’s OpenManage Enterprise support that enables customers to easily monitor and maintain data centers with OpenManage integrations. OpenManage Enterprise is a systems management console that facilitates lifecycle management for Dell EMC PowerEdge servers in one console.

“Regardless of whether you’re doing training or inferencing, solving tough problems involving fluid dynamics or genomics, analyzing data or virtualizing GPU operations, it’s time to unleash the uncompromised power of the PowerEdge XE8545,” said Dell EMC’s Pendekanti. “Catalyze the development and implementation of machine learning algorithms, quickly perform advanced computations and analyze data with amazing speed. … The PowerEdge XE8545 server [is] your innovation engine.”

• Dell EMC combines high-performance computing and data analytics with advances in machine and deep learning, enabling enterprises to address opportunities in areas such as fraud detection, image processing, financial investment analysis and personalised medicine
• New Dell EMC Machine Learning and Deep Learning Ready Bundles enable customers to easily deploy and benefit from machine and deep learning capabilities
• New Dell EMC PowerEdge C4140 accelerator-based platform for demanding cognitive workloads, powered by latest generation NVIDIA GPUs and Intel® Xeon Scalable processors, offers new performance capabilities for machine and deep learning

Full story

Dell EMC announces new machine learning and deep learning solutions, continuing the company’s work to bring high performance computing (HPC) and data analytics capabilities to mainstream enterprises worldwide. This enables organisations to take advantage of the convergence of HPC and data analytics and realise advancements in areas including fraud detection, image processing, financial investment analysis and personalised medicine. These new innovations represent the next step in the company’s focus on democratising HPC, optimising data analytics with artificial intelligence (AI) technology innovations, and advancing both the HPC and AI communities.

While AI techniques, such as machine learning and deep learning, are rapidly being deployed by many organisations across several industries, only a small number possess the expertise to design, deploy and manage such systems to use them effectively for rapidly gaining new insights. By leveraging Dell EMC’s ecosystem of strong, curated partnerships and internal expertise in HPC and data analytics services, the company’s new solutions offer customers the ability to harness the power of the massive amounts of their collected data, delivering faster, better and deeper business insights in real-time.

Enabling the best path for machine and deep learning

As emerging technologies, enterprises often have difficulty knowing where to begin to get the most out of their machine and deep learning solutions. To help them benefit from machine or deep learning, quickly and efficiently, Dell EMC offers customers HPC solutions focused on specific use cases and business problems backed by industry and HPC expertise and guidance.

Combined with knowledge from Dell EMC experts, the new Dell EMC Machine and Deep Learning Ready Bundles are part of a new portfolio that delivers on the commitment of democratising HPC and helping customers achieve faster, better and deeper data insights. These Ready Bundles combine pre-tested and validated servers, storage, networking and services optimised for machine and deep learning applications. The new Ready Bundles:

• Enable faster, better, deeper data insights: Identifying, analysing and automating data patterns empowers customers to do more with their data in a wide range of applications such as facial recognition for security, tumour diagnosis in healthcare, and better understanding of human behaviours in the retail industry.
• Include trusted experts: Using the knowledge and experience of Dell EMC and its strong ecosystem of technology partners helps customers get the most out of machine and deep learning solutions quickly.
• Maximise efficiency, security and control: Enabling customers to reduce the costs associated with moving significant amounts of data in hybrid cloud environments while minimising risk and maximising data control.

Dell EMC Ready Bundles for Machine and Deep Learning will help mainstream enterprises worldwide get a competitive advantage from these capabilities on-premises and in hybrid cloud environments.

Dell EMC Deep Learning Ready Bundle customers will benefit from the introduction of the new Dell EMC PowerEdge C4140 server, supporting latest generation NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU accelerators with PCIe and NVLink high-speed interconnect technology. This new offering is an example of the Dell EMC and NVIDIA strategic agreement for joint development of new HPC, data analytics, and artificial intelligence products and solutions announced at ISC’17 in June.

Dell EMC also plans to introduce Ready Bundles working closely with Intel technology. Dell EMC and Intel have embarked on a Joint Innovation Agreement to collaborate on advancing artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning.

Accelerate time to insights with Dell EMC PowerEdge

The new Dell EMC PowerEdge C4140 server is an ultra-dense, accelerator optimised server platform with an innovative systems design. The PowerEdge C4140 features two Intel Xeon^® Scalable Processors and four NVIDIA Tesla GPUs to deliver optimised performance for demanding cognitive workloads. The new PowerEdge C4140’s acceleration technology is ideal for intensive machine learning and deep learning applications to drive advances in scientific imaging, oil and gas exploration, financial services and other HPC industry verticals.

Transforming the future by expanding HPC, Big Data capabilities into machine and deep learning

Dell EMC’s new machine and deep learning solutions build on experience gained in collaborations with customers leading research that maximises the value from machine learning.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin actively has conducted research to identify brain tumours using machine learning as one of the first applications of its new “Stampede2” supercomputer with Intel Xeon Phi 7250 processors across 4,200 nodes connected with Intel Omni-Path Fabric. This system was developed in collaboration with Dell EMC, Intel and Seagate and ranks No. 12 on the TOP500 list of the most powerful computer systems worldwide.

Availability

• The Dell EMC Ready Bundles for Machine Learning and Deep Learning will be available in the first half of 2018 through Dell EMC and its channel partners.
• Dell EMC PowerEdge C4140 will be available worldwide in December 2017.

Armughan Ahmad, senior vice president/general manager, Hybrid Cloud and Ready Solutions, Dell EMC

“Our customers consistently tell us that one of their biggest challenges is how to best manage and learn from the ever-increasing amount of data they collect daily. With Dell EMC’s high performance computing experience, we’ve seen how their artificial intelligence solutions can deliver critical insights from this data, faster than ever before possible. Working with their strategic technology partners, we’re able to bring these powerful capabilities to all enterprises. When you think about what this means for industries like financial services or personalised medicine, the possibilities are endless and exciting.”

With support from Dell EMC, and in association with Intel and Microsoft, Dippy's Naturenauts offers a mobile-friendly interactive experience for children aged seven to eleven.

A fun activity that supports Dippy on Tour, Dippy and Fern the fox lead kids through a series of exploratory games that encourage them to venture outdoors and interact with the nature in their area while learning about science.

Through their generous support of Dippy on Tour and Dippy's Naturenauts, Dell EMC helped the Museum to help the next generation of scientists engage with the natural world through a leading a digital experience, guiding and engage them in scientific thinking. 

Dell EMC on Tuesday refreshed two of its high-performance all-flash storage lines, with the flagship VMAX, now known as PowerMax, going full speed ahead with new machine learning technology, and the XtremIO X2 line gaining a new dramatically lower entry level price point.

The refresh of the two all-flash storage array families was unveiled at the Dell Technologies World, held this week in Las Vegas.

[Related: Dell EMC Launches All-Flash Storage Barrage]

Dell EMC is still the leading vendor of all flash arrays, with a market share of 29 percent during the fourth quarter of 2017, according to an April report published by Wells Fargo Securities citing its own and IDC data.

Dell EMC's new PowerMax all-flash array, formerly known as the VMAX line, is a complete architecture refresh of the prior offerings built from the ground-up to be ready for the latest storage media technologies including the new NVMe flash storage and future server-class memory, said Sam Grocott, senior vice president of marketing for Dell EMC's Infrastructure Solutions group.

It is targeted at next-generation applications such as real-time analytics, genomics, artificial intelligence, IoT, and mobile applications, he said.

Key to the new PowerMax is the fact that it was designed for industry-standard, not proprietary, components including NVMe media, he said.

Other vendors are using proprietary NVMe components, he said. "We believe that will take them off the innovation path as industry-standard components get enhanced," he said.

The PowerMax also represents Dell EMC's first entry in the implementation of machine learning to Improve performance and provide proactive system health monitoring, said Grocott.

On the machine learning front, the new PowerMaxOS storage operating system takes advantage of years of performance and maintenance data collected from the VMAX installed base and real-time data within the array itself.

"By leveraging both, the PowerMax can make decisions about what data or block goes on what tier of storage to free up the high-performance tiers," he said. "It's leveraging over 40 million data sets, and gets smarter from the first read-write-put-get operation."

The new PowerMax 2000 scales to up to 1 petabyte of effective capacity across two "PowerBricks" after in-line deduplication and compression, and offers up to 1.7 million IOPs of performance, Grocott said.

The PowerMax 8000 scales to up to 4 petabytes of effective capacity across eight PowerBricks, with up to 10 million IOPs of performance, he said.

The PowerMax is scheduled to ship next week, he said.

Also new from Dell EMC is the latest version of the XtremIO X2, the current iteration of the company's XtremIO all-flash storage array.

The new version of the XtremIO X2 adds native replication, Grocott said. It is data-aware asynchronous replication which only sends changes to the data set to the remote site to cut bandwidth requirements by up to 75 percent with no impact to the performance, he said. The replication process can be initiated with only three steps, he said.

The new XtremIO X2 is priced at a 55-percent lower entry price point than the original XtremIO family on a per-gigabyte basis, Grocott said.

The addition of NVMe is a huge enhancement to Dell EMC's flagship storage offering, said Michael Tanenhaus, principal at Mavenspire, an Annapolis, Md.-based solution provider and long-time Dell EMC channel partner.

"The VMAX's competitive difference is that it is indestructible," Tanenhaus told CRN. "Now the PowerMax is indestructible and ultra-fast. Anyone in the trade knows SSDs are a stepping stone to performance. NVMe is a part of the natural progression."

The enhancements to the XtremIO X2 seem to be the latest in the logical progression to the product line, Tanenhaus said. When the XtremIO was first introduced a year ago, the key changes were in the software to provide a host of new storage services to the line, he said.

"If it's just performance someone wants, any vendor can provide that," he said. "But if you want low-latency file storage, go with XtremIO X2. Having all the data services makes this offering more firmly entrenched in the data center than if it were just a question of speed."

XtremIO X2 offers a landing zone on which channel partners can expand their clients' data center infrastructures, Tanenhaus said.

"If you can assign two or more workloads to XtremIO X2, it will work well and supply partners a platform on which to expand," he said. "Once people understand it, they will want to do more. And XtremIO X2 scales well," said Tanenhaus.

© 2023 Fortune Media IP Limited. All Rights Reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of their Terms of Use and Privacy Policy | CA Notice at Collection and Privacy Notice | Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Information | Ad Choices 
FORTUNE is a trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, registered in the U.S. and other countries. FORTUNE may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice.
S&P Index data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Terms & Conditions. Powered and implemented by Interactive Data Managed Solutions.