Dell unveiled two servers designed to
reduce power consumption and deliver dramatic improvements in performance and
performance per watt for enterprise customers.

Dell’s PowerEdge(TM) 2970 and PowerEdge Energy Smart 2970 will be the
first servers from a major systems provider to market with the new Dual
Dynamic Power Management feature; ready to enable optimized quad-core
performance and power management. Both servers are designed to handle multiple
generations of AMD Opteron processors, providing a seamless upgrade path to
quad-core and allowing customers to increase computing capacity, consolidate
and deploy virtualized environments without altering their data center
infrastructure.

The PowerEdge 2970 server is engineered to draw up to 34 per cent less
power(1) and deliver up to 105 per cent greater performance per watt(2) over
the previous generation of Dell servers featuring dual-core processors.

“Organizations are increasingly looking to solutions based on industry
standard X86 servers, utilizing advanced multi-core processors,” according to
Marc Perrella, Vice President, Technology Group, IDC Canada. “With ever
increasing computing power that can keep power consumption in check, paired
with effective scale-out solutions like virtualization, IT executives can
increase operational efficiency while more rapidly deploying systems to help
their organizations more quickly respond to market opportunities for growth.”

The PowerEdge 2970 and Power Edge Energy Smart 2970 server incorporate
innovative design features, standards-based technologies and Dell’s commitment
to hardware commonality. With the latest Dell OpenManage systems
management software and tight integration of leading third-party suites,
customers can simplify enterprise operations with a single, flexible
management solution across the server lifecycle
.

“Customers are constantly challenged with constraints on their IT
infrastructure and lifecycle costs,” said Debora Jensen, vice president of the
Advanced Solutions Group at Dell Canada. “We’re committed to help with
comprehensive offerings that reduce total cost of ownership through
virtualization, energy efficiency and accelerating multi-core adoption.”

“The PowerEdge 2970 and PowerEdge Energy Smart 2970 servers,” Jensen
added, “provide significant advantages to meet customer needs in the areas of
power and cooling, while continuing our commitment to reducing complexity and
lowering overall lifecycle costs through a simplified upgrade path in
deploying multi-core platforms without driving a veiled proprietary
architecture or platform.”

A Balanced Platform and Commitment to Commonality for Simplified
Operations

The Dell PowerEdge 2970 server maximizes the balance between performance,
energy efficiency and price and was designed to excel with database, messaging
and network infrastructure applications as well as for the virtualization of
IT environments. Features of the PowerEdge 2970 include:

– Dell’s ninth-generation commonality features, including design layout
and behavioral specifications, help reduce the learning curve of
maintaining and servicing Dell PowerEdge servers.
– AMD Direct Connect Architecture, which helps eliminate bottlenecks
that certain applications and workloads run into with traditional
front-side bus architectures.
– SAS hard drives designed for increased reliability and data
transmission.
– PCI-Express I/O for high-performance Ethernet, RAID, InfiniBand and
Fibre Channel interconnect and helps provide investment protection
for future technologies.
– TCP/IP Offload Engine designed to provide greater performance for
PowerEdge servers running Windows Server(TM) 2003 SP1, by offloading
TCP/IP traffic from the host processor to an integrated NIC
processor.
– New Dual Dynamic Power management feature ready to enable optimized
Quad Core performance and power management.

Committed to Delivering the Most Energy Efficient Designs in the Industry

Dell has extended its Energy Smart lineup with the PowerEdge Energy Smart
2970 server to help customers decrease power consumption and reduce overall
operating costs. The Dell PowerEdge Energy Smart 2970 server can deliver up to
25 per cent greater performance per watt(3) while reducing power consumption
by up to 21 per cent(3) compared to standard PowerEdge 2970 Servers.

These improvements can save hundreds of dollars per server every year,
which can translate to millions of dollars per year in large data center
deployments. Customers can also benefit from the smaller energy footprint to
drive increased density in the data center by deploying up to four PowerEdge
Energy Smart servers within the same “power envelope” that would be occupied
today by three standard PowerEdge 2970 servers.

Dell has engineered the standards-based PowerEdge Energy Smart servers
from the ground up optimizing for power efficiency. Features include:

– Low-flow fan technology
– High-efficiency power supplies
– Low-voltage/high-efficiency processors
– Factory-integrated BIOS and unique component specifications designed
for increased efficiency and air flow

Pricing and Availability

The Dell PowerEdge 2970 is available today worldwide with pricing
starting at $2,069 CAN. The Dell PowerEdge Energy Smart 2970 will be available
in the coming weeks. For more information, visit: www.dell.ca/poweredge. For a
video overview of the PowerEdge 2970, visit: www.dellenterprise.ca. To get
Dell news direct, visit www.dell.com/RSS.