IBM Fusion HCI Adds the Choice of Dell Servers



IBM Fusion HCI System has announced today a significant new choice for customers when configuring the hardware of a Fusion HCI System. Now customers can choose to build their Fusion HCI systems using Dell servers!

The primary building blocks of a Fusion HCI System are the servers that provide the storage and compute resources.  Now customers can choose between either Lenovo or Dell servers for these building blocks when defining the hardware of their Fusion HCI systems.

The new Dell servers are PowerEdge R660XL servers.  They come in both 32-core and 64-core configurations using Intel Xeon 4 "Sapphire Rapids" processors and high-speed DDR5 RAM.  The 32-core Dell servers come standard with 256GB of RAM that can be optionally doubled to 512GB RAM.  The 64-core Dell servers come standard with 1024GB RAM which can also be doubled to give 2048GB of RAM -- that's 32 GB of RAM per core!

These Dell servers can optionally include up to 10x hot-swappable PCIe Gen 5 SED NVMe drives to create the storage cluster within the Fusion HCI system.  Both 3.84TB and 7.68TB capacity NVMe drives are available for matching the size of the storage cluster to application requirements.  For installing the server's OS, each Dell server comes with a pair of 960GB M.2 SED NVMe hot-swappable drives that are configured for RAID 1 to provide redundancy and resiliency.

Connecting these new Dell servers together are a pair of NVIDIA SN3700 200Gb Ethernet switches.  Each Dell server has an NVIDIA ConnectX-6 DX dual-port 100GbE NIC, allowing for up to 200GbE of bandwidth between the servers and the switches.  Serviceability of the Fusion HCI system is enhanced with a Dell PowerEdge R660 server that acts as a service node and is included with every system.  There is also a pair of NVIDIA SN2201 1Gb Ethernet management switches that provides the connectivity needed to control and monitor every device with the Fusion HCI System.

With this new choice and the power and flexibility that comes with it, there's never been a better time to deploy Fusion HCI System!

For more information about IBM Fusion, check out https://www.ibm.com/products/storage-fusion

Previous post: IBM Fusion HCI System Levels Up


The opinions expressed in this post are those of the author.


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