Dell EMC PowerEdge MX7000 Kinetic Based Data Infrastructure Architecture

Posted by Richard Jones, xByte Sales Engineer on Jul 13, 2022

Improving the performance of traditional applications with emerging technologies can help your organization achieve many goals, from growing your revenue to expanding your customer base.

The Dell EMC PowerEdge MX modular solution powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors offers an innovative, flexible architecture that allows your organization to deploy workload environments that can boost performance of traditional applications. These environments can also dynamically scale and respond to your changing operational needs now and in the future. The MX supports Gen-Z, an open-systems fabric-based architecture designed to interconnect processors, memory devices and accelerators as future technologies evolves.

The Dell EMC PowerEdge MX loosens the bounds of traditional infrastructure by leveraging shared pools of compute, storage, and networking assets to create disaggregated fully consumable resources on demand, which can allow organizations to adapt to changing workload demands and get better performance from applications.

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX7000 platform powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors

The future is not a fixed destination. It is dynamic when comes to IT infrastructure. Disaggregation enables fully composable infrastructure.

Dell EMC Kinetic Composability - What Is It?

As a composable data infrastructure resource and server, Dell EMC Kinetic based solutions can be decomposed with finer granularity than previous servers. What this means is that in the past, memory, I/O network, physical storage devices, compute sockets and cores were assigned to a single image instance. The only image instance could be an operating system (OS) such as Linux or Windows based, a hypervisor such as KVM, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nitro (AWS), Oracle, VMware vSphere ESXi, or Xen among others, as well as proprietary decomposition and aggregation software (and hardware) technology. With a composable based solution, instead of the entire server, or motherboard(s) and its resources allocated to a single OS as a bare metal (BM) or Metal as a Service (MaaS) instance, or to a hypervisor, different resources can be allocated to various instances. On the surface it would be easy to say that sounds a lot like what hypervisors and others are doing, particular with clusters.

However, the difference is that with hypervisors, all of a server’s physical resources (compute, memory, I/O, storage devices, GPU, FPGA/ASIC) are allocated to the OS, hypervisor, or composition software, that then creates vCPU, vRAM, and related resources.

The Dell EMC PowerEdge MX7000 eliminates the traditional hardware-based mid-plane with an internal fabric connector per node that can also be exposed outside of the physical MX enclosure. By using an industry standard connector on the edge of server motherboard resource nodes, different server I/O connectivity can be leveraged as it becomes available or improves.

Increase agility and adaptability to unlock value:

Compose any server configuration on demand
Optimize hardware for specific workloads:
Business Applications
HCI, Software defined and dense virtualization
Big Data, Data Analytics, ERP, Database, etc.

Unlock trapped resources with no silos of server, compute, and storage
Avoid overprovisioning, utilize all your resources for optimal resource allocation
Purchase resources independently and pay-as-you-grow
Technologies evolve, as they become available, they can be deployed independently

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX7000 Server Compute Modules

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX7000 Compute sleds include MX740c (single width) and MX840c (double width) that are two and four socket modules with local on-board NVMe drives (per module). These initial compute modules support Cascade Lake Intel Xeon scalable processors with up to 28 Cores and up to six (6) TBytes of memory. The MX740c supports up to six (6) local NVMe, SAS or SATA drives, while the MX840c supports up to eight (8) local drives and maximum of eight. Note that these local onboard drives can be shared with other sled modules, as well as compute sleds that can access the shared storage sled-based drives. The MX7000 chassis can support up to eight MX740c and four MX840x server sleds.

The Dell EMC PowerEdge MX750c is the latest addition to the PowerEdge MX infrastructure ecosystem, is a fully featured, high-performance, modular compute sled for exceptional scalability. The MX750c is a fully configurable single-width compute sled with up two-40 core 3rd Generation Ice Lake Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. Each PowerEdge MX750c supports 32 DDR4 DIMM slots and up to six 2.5-inch SAS/SATA (HDD/SDD) or Express Flash NVMe PCIe SSDs drives. A maximum of eight MX750c servers can be installed in the PowerEdge MX7000 chassis.

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX7000 Server Storage Modules

Dell EMC PowerEdge MX7000 Storage sled consists of MX5016s holding up to 16 hot-pluggable SAS HDD and SSDs. Up to seven MX5016s sleds can be configured per MX chassis for up to 112 direct attached shared storage (DAS) drives. Each of the drives can be individually mapped to one or more servers supporting aggregated (e.g., HCI) as well as disaggregated (CI and legacy) deployment topologies.

Support diverse, data-heavy workloads such as SDS (vSAN), SQL, ERP, and dense virtualization
Map individual drives to two-socket MX740c, MX750c and four-socket MX840c servers
Configure your direct-attached SAS environment with PERC and HBA storage controller options
Help deliver high availability for your critical workloads with dual port 12Gb/s SAS, hot-pluggable drives, and hot serviceable expanders
Assign the appropriate ratios of compute, storage, and networking, then adapt as workloads change

Server I/O Connectivity Options

MX5108n Ethernet Switch with 8 x 25GbE (server facing ports), 2 x 100GbE ports, 1 x 40GbE port, 4 x 10GbE ports
MX9116n Fabric Switching Engine (e.g., Kinetic fabric) with 16 x 25GbE server facing ports, 2 x 100GbE/8 x 32GFC unified ports, 2 x 100 GbE ports and 12 fabric expansion ports
MXG610s Fibre Channel Switch with 16 x 32GFC internal ports, 8 x 32 GFC SFP+ ports and 2 QSFP (4 x 32GFC) uplink ports

Conclusion

If you want better database performance and data center flexibility to meet future demand, the new, innovative Dell EMC PowerEdge MX powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors offers distinct architectural advantages that can allow your organization to build high-performance environments running any workload.

Contact xByte today, [email protected], to receive a custom quote on Dell EMC PowerEdge MX7000 Kinetic Based Data Infrastructure Architecture.