Dell Extends Commitment to Lead Industry in Server Performance Per Watt and Energy Efficient Design

ROUND ROCK, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) today unveiled two servers designed to reduce power consumption and deliver dramatic improvements in performance and performance per watt for enterprise customers.

“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.”

Dell’s PowerEdge 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 percent less power¹ and deliver up to 105 percent greater performance per watt² over the previous generation of Dell servers featuring dual-core processors.

The PowerEdge 2970 server and PowerEdge 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 Jay Parker, director of PowerEdge Servers, Dell Product Group. “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,” Parker 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 server 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 application 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™ 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 percent greater performance per watt³ while reducing power consumption by up to 21 percent³ 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 PowerEdge Energy Smart servers from the ground up as the industry's first standards-based servers optimized 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 $1,849. The Dell PowerEdge Energy Smart 2970 will be available in the coming weeks. For more information, visit: www.dell.com/poweredge.

About Dell

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ:DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services they trust and value. Uniquely enabled by its direct business model, Dell is a leading global systems and services company and No. 25 on the Fortune 500. For more information, visit www.dell.com. To get Dell news direct, visit www.dell.com/RSS.

Pricing, specifications, availability, and terms of offers may change without notice. Taxes, fees, shipping, handling and any applicable restocking charges are extra, and vary. U.S. new purchases only. Dell cannot be responsible for pricing or other errors, and reserves the right to cancel orders arising from such errors

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Dell disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.

¹Based on AC power measurements using an Extech 380803 Power Analyzer taken during the peak load of the SPECjbb2005 benchmark test performed by Dell Labs in February 2007 on a PE2970 with two dual-core AMD Opteron 2212 HE (2.0GHz) processors, 16GB 667MHz DDR2 memory and Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition (SP1) OS as compared to a PE2850 with two dual-core Intel Xeon 2.8GHz (Paxville) processors, 8GB 400MHz DDR2 memory and Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition (SP1) OS. Actual power consumption will vary based on configuration, usage and manufacturing variability.

²Based on the SPECjbb2005 benchmark test and power measurements performed by Dell Labs in February 2007 on a PE2970 with two dual-core AMD Opteron 2212 HE (2.0GHz) processors, 16GB 667MHz DDR2 memory and Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition (SP1) OS as compared to a PE2850 with two dual-core Intel Xeon 2.8GHz (Paxville) processors, 8GB 400MHz DDR2 memory and Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition (SP1) OS. Actual power consumption will vary based on configuration, usage and manufacturing variability.

³Based on the SPECjbb2005 benchmark test and power measurements performed by Dell Labs in April 2007 on a PE Energy Smart 2970 with two dual-dual core AMD Opteron 2212HE (2.00 GHz) processors, 8GB DDR2-667 ECC 1R memory and W2K3 x64 SP1 OS as compared to a PE Standard 2970 two dual-dual core AMD Opteron 2212HE (2.00 GHz) processors, 8GB DDR2-667 ECC 1R memory and W2K3 x64 SP1 OS. Actual power consumption will vary based on configuration, usage and manufacturing variability. Actual power consumption will vary based on configuration, usage and manufacturing variability.