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 the 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 evolve.
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.
The future is not a fixed destination. It is dynamic when it 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, particularly 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 midplane 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 and use all your resources for optimal resource allocation
- Purchase resources independently and pay‑as‑you‑grow
- Technologies can be deployed independently as they become available
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 onboard NVMe drives (per module). These initial compute modules support Cascade Lake Intel Xeon scalable processors with up to 28 cores and up to 6TB of memory. The MX740c supports up to six local NVMe, SAS, or SATA drives, while the MX840c supports up to eight local drives. 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 MX840c server sleds.
The Dell EMC PowerEdge MX750c is the latest addition to the PowerEdge MX infrastructure ecosystem, and is a fully featured, high‑performance, modular compute sled for exceptional scalability. The MX750c is a fully configurable single‑width compute sled with up to two 40‑core 3rd Generation Intel Ice Lake Xeon Scalable processors. Each PowerEdge MX750c supports 32 DDR4 DIMM slots and up to six 2.5‑inch SAS/SATA (HDD/SSD) or Express Flash NVMe PCIe SSD 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 module consists of the MX5016s holding up to 16 hot‑pluggable SAS HDDs and SSDs. Up to seven MX5016s storage 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 100GbE ports, and 12 fabric expansion ports
- MXG610s Fibre Channel Switch with 16 x 32GFC internal ports, 8 x 32GFC 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.