If your business is growing and you’re looking to add some extra compute and storage into your datacenter, the new PowerEdge C6320 is an option worth considering.
“We try and scale our products to fit everything from your-scale to hyper-scale,” said Brian Payne, executive director of PowerEdge marketing, Dell. “Mainstream and rack servers still make up the majority of the server market, but in our Data Center Solutions Group we adopt a strategy of building the best and most efficient datacenters in the world, as opposed to just building a great server to go into a datacenter.”
That focus on the big picture in the datacenter is at the core of the hyper-converged server market. Hyper-converged are dense, combining the server sleds, storage and networking into a single shared infrastructure chassis. Top off the converged hardware appliance with a suite of management software and you have a complete environment, a datacenter in a box, and you’ve got everything you need to go.
Dell PowerEdge C6320 is a 4 in 2U package; that is, 4 HPC server nodes in a 2U appliance. So just how much compute can you cram into 2U? Each of the 4 nodes can run two Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors. At 18 cores per processor, you’re fitting 144 cores in a fully loaded 2U device. Each node has room for four DDR4 DIMMs, so your RAM capacity should accommodate your current needs. Storage presents you with options; you can either populate it with twenty-four 2.5″ drives, or twelve 3.5″ drives.
Hardware management is simplified through the Dell iDRAC8, the LifeCycle controller and the Dell OpenManage enterprise tool. When it’s time to scale up, you just add another hyper-converged appliance. As long as you have the space on your rack, you’ll be able to grow your CPU cores, RAM and storage in tandem.
While the hardware and management software by itself are great for starting a hyper-converged or HPC initiative, if you’ve already got some investment in your datacenter, there may be some ways that the PowerEdge C6320 integrates neatly. Some Dell offerings, such as the XC-Series of converged appliances, are powered by Nutanix, and the C6320 will be available with Nutanix in Q4 of 2015. Another option for increased compatibility using the C6320 is the VMware EVO:RAIL compatible offering, which was engineered in partnership with VMware and will be available in July 2015.
If this sounds like something you’d like in your datacenter, you’re not alone. Hyper-converged servers are a fast-growing market segment, with triple-digit growth this year and many in the industry expecting the market to be worth billions annually.
The Dell PowerEdge C6320 is available soon with a starting price of around $16,600 that includes the chassis, four C6320 nodes, two Xeon E5-2603 v3 CPUs, 16 GB DDR4 memory, a 2.5-inch 7200rpm 250 GB SATA hard drive, iDRAC8 Express and 3-year warranty.
