Today, Dell announced the addition of 3 new blade servers to its PowerEdge portfolio – the PowerEdge M820, PowerEdge M520 and the PowerEdge M420.  Each server offers a unique addition to the Dell blade server family and will be available soon.

 PowerEdge M820

The PowerEdge M820 is a full-height, 4-socket blade server that is the first to use the Intel Xeon E5-4600 processor family.  The M820 has 48 DIMMs for up to 1.5TB of memory and comes with 2 x Select Network Adapters providing a choice between 10Gb Brocade, Broadcom or QLogic.  The server also has 4 additional I/O mezzanine card slots capable of holding additional 10Gb, Infiniband or Fibre cards.  The PowerEdge M820 will be available to purchase in mid-Q2 2012.  Find out more at:

http://www.dell.com/us/enterprise/p/poweredge-m820/pd?~ck=anav

PowerEdge M520

If you are familiar with the Dell PowerEdge M610 blade server, then the new PowerEdge M520 shouldn’t be any surprise to you.  It offers the same form factor and the same amount of memory, but is based on the newer Intel Sandy Bridge CPU.  The PowerEdge M520 is a half-height, 2-socket blade server that uses the Intel Xeon E5-2400 processor family.  As with most of the servers in the E5-2400 family, the M520 has 12 DIMMs for up to 192GB of memory.  Unlike the M820 or the M620, the PowerEdge M520 does not come with the Select Network Adapter, but instead comes standard with 4 x 1GbE Dual Port LOM.  (It is important to note, that a 48-port Blade Module, like the PowerConnect M6348, is required to have all 4 NICs available for use; otherwise only 2 of the 4 are available.) The server also has 2 additional I/O mezzanine card slots capable of holding additional 10Gb, Infiniband or Fibre cards.  The PowerEdge M520 is scheduled to be available for purchase in the next few weeks.  Find out more at:

http://www.dell.com/us/enterprise/p/poweredge-m520/pd?~ck=anav

PowerEdge M420

The PowerEdge M420 is a quarter-height, 2-socket blade server that uses the Intel Xeon E5-2400 processor family.  The M420 introduces a new concept to Dell’s blade family by allowing up to 32 servers within a single Dell PowerEdge M1000e blade chassis.  Each PowerEdge M420 blade server has up to 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2400 CPUs, 6 DIMM slots (for up to 96GB of memory), 2 internal SD slots, a Dual Port 10Gb Broadcom 57810s onboard NIC, 1 x mezzanine expansion.

The M420 quarter-height blades are deployed in the M1000e using a full-height sleeve known as a “subassembly”.  While each sleeve does not need to be fully populated with M420 blades in order to be installed, it does occupy the same physical space as a full-height blade, however it can be positioned adjacent to other half-height servers.  The M420 offers a great platform for any application using a lot of CPU processing.  A 42U rack can hold 4 x Dell PowerEdge M1000e chassis and each chassis can hold 32 PowerEdge M420 server.  That means you can have up to 128 Dell PowerEdge M420s in a rack.  Each M420 can hold 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2400 CPUs with a total of 16 CPU cores so that equates to 2,048 CPU cores in a rack. 

The PowerEdge M420 is scheduled to be available for purchase in the next few weeks.  Find out more at: http://www.dell.com/us/enterprise/p/poweredge-m420/pd?~ck=anav

For a list of all of Dell’s blade server offerings, visit http://www.dell.com/us/enterprise/p/poweredge-mseries-servers?~ck=anav

Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com.  He has over 15 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace.  Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization.  Kevin works for Dell as a Server Specialist covering the Global 500 East market.