Dell unveils first shared infrastructure solution to provide hyperscale customers with new modular computational and storage capabilities

Dell today announced the PowerEdge C8000 Series, the industry’s first 4U shared infrastructure solution to allow the mixing and matching of compute, GPU/coprocessors and storage sleds in one chassis. 

Ideally suited for workloads that require high performance per watt and flexibility in configuration, such as high-performance computing (HPC) and big data applications, the PowerEdge C8000 series delivers the ideal mix of resources, while saving on space, energy and refresh rates, and allowing customers to run their data centers at higher operating temperatures. Customers can pack more compute power in less space than traditional 1U servers, with the cores, memory and I/O expansion needed for peak workload performance. 

Shared Infrastructure Results in Lower Total Cost of Ownership

Customers running highly resource-intensive hyperscale workloads can benefit from shared infrastructure pools and shared compute, storage, power and cooling resources that result in lower total cost of ownership in power efficiency, system scaling efficiency and compute density. The shared infrastructure reduces power and cooling costs and enables customer to refresh with the latest components without having to replace the entire chassis. Additionally, the PowerEdge C8000 Series can provide customers with up to 4x  the server density when compared to competitive solutions.

Mix and Match Compute, Compute/GPU and Storage Sleds

The PowerEdge C8000 shared infrastructure chassis holds up to eight single-wide sleds or four double-wide sleds. Each compute sled is equivalent to a standard server built with a processor, memory, network interface, baseboard management controller, and local hard drive storage. Dell customers can speed up their most resource-intensive workloads by mixing and matching the following compute, GPU/coprocessor and storage sleds in the same 4U chassis:

The PowerEdge C8220 compute sled: packs a lot of compute power in a dense space. Up to eight C8220 nodes can slide into the C8000 chassis mounted on specially-designed single-width sleds, delivering the compute power of up to 16 next-generation processors in just 4U of rack space.

The PowerEdge C8220X compute/GPU sled: further increases the performance and compute/memory density per rack, as well as allowing the use of GPUs and other accelerators. Customers can run multiple workloads in a single chassis in scientific visualizations and other resource-intensive workloads.

The PowerEdge C8000XD storage sled: fits up to 1.4x more local storage in 40U of rack space. This sled is ideal for workloads requiring flexible storage expansion, such as HPC, Hadoop and hosting environments. 

PowerEdge C8000 Customer Deployment Breaks New Ground

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) is leveraging the performance and flexibility benefits of the PowerEdge C8000 series in its new supercomputer “Stampede” which is expected to become a model for supporting petascale-level computational science. 

“TACC’s Stampede infrastructure consists of several thousand PowerEdge C8000 servers with GPUs to help speed scientific discovery,” said Dr. Dan Stanzione, deputy director at TACC. “Dell’s infrastructure is invaluable in our mission of supporting data-intensive computing and visualization in complex computational science and engineering research including weather forecasting, climate modeling, energy exploration and production, drug discovery, new materials design and manufacturing, and more efficient and safer automobiles and airplanes.“

“At Dell, we are constantly working to address our customers’ evolving needs for solutions that deliver the ultimate in performance for their heaviest workloads, while saving on space, energy and refresh rates. This focus has resulted in Dell’s sustained leadership in IDC’s density optimized server market share report,” said Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager, Server Solutions, Dell. “Today, based on those customer needs, we are introducing a shared infrastructure solution that provides unprecedented flexibility, performance and efficiency for hyperscale environments.”