Our top of the line server for your most demanding workloads: The Dell PowerEdge R920

Information is power. We’ve all heard this before - but the reality is that for enterprises today, fast and easy access to a deluge of information really does become one of the most powerful advantages a company can have over its competitors. At Dell we understand this, which is why we continue to push the envelope with our PowerEdge server portfolio to address the business needs of today and tomorrow.

Today I am excited to announce the latest addition to the PowerEdge server portfolio, the Dell PowerEdge R920, our highest performing server, which allows customers to deliver faster results, quickly adapt to changing business needs, and improve overall reliability. Customers like the City of Round Rock believe technology plays a critical role in the functioning of their city, from improving the way they handle emergency situations to anticipating problems in real-time. 

For example, Brooks Bennett, CIO of the City of Round Rock recently said:

Our police and fire departments need data to be accessible at the drop of a hat and they cannot be slowed to get to where they need to go.  With the PowerEdge R920 we can have instant access to mission critical data that is required for our city’s first responders.  The R920 is a beast in terms of performance, onboard storage and all the workloads it can push. It will let us do our job faster and more effectively while helping us keep our community safe.

The 4-socket, 4U PowerEdge R920, built on Intel’s new E7 processors, is designed to handle extremely demanding, mission critical workloads like enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), e-commerce, and very large databases – including in-memory databases. Initial workload testing shows:

SAP workloads:

•           A world record 4-socket Linux benchmark result of 24,150 benchmark users on the SAP SD 2-Tier benchmark.

•           A 71% improved performance over the previous best E7-4800 4-socket SAP SD benchmark.

•           Nearly the same performance in an SAP environment compared with the previous generation 8-socket servers, providing up to a 50% cost savings in software licensing to the customer.

Oracle workloads:

•           Customers processing more than twice the number of Oracle OLAP queries than with previous generation server configurations and when coupled with a Dell Compellent Flash-optimized solution.

•           More than twice the throughput to process larger Oracle OLAP data sets and twice the reduction in latency.

So what makes the PowerEdge R920 different from previous generations and other solutions on the market?  It comes down to a few simple points:

•           Getting results faster: Applications can perform more transactions in less time, with up to 60 cores of processing power and several significant data access enhancements: like the 8 ultra high performance, ultra low latency PCIe Express Flash drives that far surpass the IOPS performance of rotating drives, the new H730P PowerEdge RAID controller (PERC) that doubles the previous cache size and delivers up to 100% more IOPS performance, and the dual PERC capacity that lets customers maximize performance across the larger number of available solid state drives (SSDs).

•           Scaling to match the challenge: With 6 TB of memory and up to 24 local storage drives, the R920 is designed to allow IT to grow quickly in response to dynamic business conditions. The R920 is also an excellent candidate for threaded HPC applications that require large amounts of shared memory (SMP codes). These “fat nodes” are essential in most modern HPC systems to accommodate applications that scale-up (vs. scale-out). The R920 includes a plug-in for managing or monitoring your HPC environment via Nagios (Linux console). We know our customers want as much CPU performance as they can get for their applications. With that in mind, we’ve integrated agent-free out of band monitoring to free up those critical cycles for greater performance benefits.

•           Running without disruption: With built-in reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features, like Dell’s exclusive Fault Resilient Memory and Intel’s Run Sure Technology the R920 lets customers operate their data centers with added confidence. New integration between OpenManage Essentials and Dell AppAssure software, along with automated embedded server configuration backup via iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller can also help improve service continuity by backing up the entire server stack of hardware, OS and applications so customers can operate with peace of mind.

You might have heard about the record-breaking Dell Fluid Cache for SAN, which was recently featured during Michael Dell’s Dell World keynote. This is an enterprise application acceleration solution that’s aimed at speeding up response times by bringing the most frequently accessed business data closer to the compute resources. When customers demand a “right now” experience, every second matters in order to remain competitive. That’s why we were so proud to reach a record-breaking 5 million IOPS during our Dell World demonstration. The PowerEdge R920 will be able to leverage capabilities of Fluid Cache for SAN when it is introduced in the near future.

At Dell, we are consistently pushing the boundaries when it comes to performance, scalability and reliability, and the new PowerEdge R920 is the latest example of providing our customers with the technology they need to remain competitive – and powerful – in today’s information age. The PowerEdge R920 will be available worldwide later this quarter.