Dell Technologies introduced new hardware products and services at two separate conferences, the Supercomputing 24 show in Atlanta and Microsoft’s Ignite conference.
Dell announced two server products, the PowerEdge XE7740 and PowerEdge XE9685L, as well as updates to its Integrated Rack 5000 (IR5000) series. The Dell Integrated Rack 5000 series is an expansion of the 7000 rack series, which can be either liquid-cooled or air-cooled and can hold 96 GPUs per rack.
The PowerEdge XE7740 is equipped with the latest Xeon Scalable Gen Six processors and is built for AI inferencing and model fine tuning. The Dell PowerEdge XE9685L holds up to 96 Nvidia H200 or B200 GPUs per rack for high-density computing needs, such as AI training.
In addition to the Xeon processors, customers have access to a wide set of AI accelerator configurations. They can start with a single 75-watt GPU and scale to as many as eight double-wide GPU cards. It also has eight front PCIe slots that allow for high speed network cards, necessary to feed the GPUs.
“If you don’t have a high-speed network connecting the GPU to GPU, then you don’t get maximum performance,” Varun Chhabra, senior vice president of ISG and telecom product marketing at Dell, said in a conference call briefing.
Dell is also launching its next-generation liquid cooled platform with AMD CPUs. It supports both the CPU and GPU cooling and can handle up to 96 GPUs in a rack. Dell added two more PCIe slots to its servers for a total of 12 PCIe slots on the server.
The Integrated Rack 7000 is an update to the existing 5000 model and will support the upcoming Nvidia GB200 Grace Blackwell NVL4 Superchip with a new PowerEdge XE server designed for the IR7000. All told, the IR 7000 supports up to 144 GPUs per rack in a 50OU standard rack.
Separately, Dell announced it will offer support for Nvidia Tensor Core GPUs by the end of the year, including the H200 SXM cloud GPUs. The two companies are working on integrating Nvidia software with Dell hardware infrastructure. The first move will be support for Nvidia H100 NVL GPUs in upcoming PowerEdge servers.
Dell also is offering a new solution for general professional users and data scientists, called Dell Agentic RAG with Nvidia. Its RAG agents handle company-specific data access and regulatory challenges. The software is available now, while the GPU update will be available by the end of the year.
Microsoft Ignite announcements
The news announced at Microsoft Ignite was understandably centered around Microsoft products as related to Dell AI Factory, the company’s AI initiative covering products and services. First up, Dell announced that its APEX File Storage for Microsoft Azure will offer a Dell-managed option for organizations seeking a simplified deployment and management experience.
Dell PowerScale, its enterprise NAS file storage system, will be geared to more easily meet the needs of AI workloads in multicloud environments. It features burst capacity for performance-intensive AI workloads, reduced management complexity, and faster time to data-driven insights through native integration with Microsoft AI Service tools.
Also new are Dell APEX Protection Services for Microsoft Azure, delivered as Dell-managed, AI-powered cloud data protection and cyber resiliency across edge locations, remote offices and data centers. It offers zero trust security, including immutability, encryption, multi-factor authentication and role-based access controls and protects against ransomware and cyberthreats. The companies say that they can accelerate time to recovery from cyber attack by as much as 80%.
Among the new security services for Microsoft environments are Advisory Services for Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) for Microsoft to help customers align their cybersecurity posture with CMMC guidelines through specific recommendations for Microsoft solutions, and a Managed Detection and Response with Microsoft service where Dell monitors, detects, investigates, and responds to threats 24/7 across the IT environment.
Source:: Network World