Dell Launches Sustainable Data Centre Products

Dell has introduced new data centre products and mangement services to help companies improve the efficiency of computing infrastructure, the company claims.

The computer maker announced two new data centre products this week, the Dell PowerEdge 4220 and PowerEdge 2420 rack enclosures, designed to make data centres easier to manage and more sustainable.

The company also announced that its data centre consulting practice will use Future Facilities 6SigmaDC software suite to help customers maximise data centre space utilisation and energy efficiency, via features such as virtual design and 3-D modeling.

“We have a pretty holistic understanding of the ecosystem of the data centre,” Albert Esser, vice president of data centre infrastructure for Dell, said in an interview. “For each device we design, we put it within that context.”

The PowerEdge 4220 and PowerEdge 2420 incorporate several features, including flexible rear and side-rack power distribution unit (PDU) options that make it easier to access power outlets within the rack, and air dams at the front mounting posts to prevent hot air from leaking back to the front of the servers and increasing server inlet air temperatures.

Cable management has also been simplified, with adjustable cable rings and removable tail-bars at the top and bottom of the rack back frame. The PowerEdge 4220 rack has a static load bearing of 1136 kilos, while the PowerEdge 2420 has a static load rating of 681 kilos.

Dell maintains that these improvements will translate into increased energy efficiency for the data centre infrastructure.

The company has made a concerted effort to beef up its virtualization, server and storage offerings over the past few months. In September 2008, it rolled out the Dell PowerEdge M905 and M805 blade servers, and offered expanded support for Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX.

A 25 Feb report from IDC showed that Dell, along with Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems, suffered from declining server systems revenue in the fourth quarter of 2008, dragged down by a US economy in recession.

By utilising Future Facilities’ 6SigmaDC software suite for its data centre-consulting practice, Dell hopes to make use of Virtual Facility, which creates a  3-D representation of the data centre. In theory, this would allow the creation of a more energy-efficient data centre, and prevent the costly purchasing of unnecessary equipment, the company claims.

Dell and Future Facilities said that the use of Virtual Facility will allow issues to be identified before facilities are built, also saving costs.