Dell brings new 'Blade' servers to cut IBM, HP

Dell Inc. on Monday introduced a new line of blade servers, giving a significant boost to its efforts to grab more of the fast-growing market from IBM and Hewlett-Packard. Dell hopes the new PowerEdge M-Series lineup will strengthen its position in the ongoing server competition.

Dell, the world's leading producer of PCs, boasts the new PowerEdge M-Series, which includes the M1000e Modular Blade Enclosure, will be more energy-efficient than the competing products from H-P and IBM.

Dell claims its new line of blade servers consumes 19% less energy and achieves up to 25% better performance per watt than HP BladeSystem c-Class. And, when compared to the IBM BladeCenter H, the PowerEdge M-Series consumes 12% less energy and delivers up to 28% more performance per watt.

“Blade offerings have been long on promises and short on helping customers address the growing costs and complexity in their data centers,” said Brad Anderson, senior vice president, Dell Business Product Group.

“The PowerEdge M-Series delivers on those promises with unmatched energy efficiency, flexibility, performance and manageability. It enables customers to achieve the compute performance they need while lowering their overall power consumption and reducing data center complexity and server sprawl,” he continued.

The M1000e blade enclosure is a 10U-sized enclosure that can support up to 16 dual-socket blades, and is optimized for Dell’s PowerEdge M600 and M605 blade servers. The M600 is an Intel-based blade server; whiles the M605 is an AMD-based blade server.

The enclosure supports a range of network connectivity options, including modules for Ethernet, Fibre Channel and InfiniBand connectivity, and allows users to upgrade or stack up on network hardware to boost networking speed.

According to Dell, its new lineup of blade servers is the most extensive research and development project, which is the result of 55,000 man hours. The company has applied for more than 30 patents on the new product.

Prices for the top models’ blades start at just $1,849, and the enclosure has a starting price of $5,999.

Blades are compact, self-contained servers that can be plugged into a network to run Web pages and perform other computing jobs.

Blade servers are a type of architecture where multiple server modules are housed in a single chassis to save space and ease management, and are growing faster than the overall server market.

Dell shares jumped 22 cents to close at $21.08 Friday.