The Scottish government’s Agriculture and Rural Economy (ARE) Directorate has quietly become one of the most agile, dynamic government agencies as part of its longstanding relationship with Pure Storage. 

Responsible for coordinating subsidies for businesses and farmers operating in agriculture, the ARE Directorate plays a crucial role in ensuring the industry in Scotland remains productive – and, crucially, profitable. 

Serving upwards of 20,000 farmers, the ARE Directorate pays out more than £700 million in subsidies annually. These payments are vital to ensure farmers can operate and the country remains fed. But to ensure it can continue to serve the industry, the division was forced to adopt an agile approach to innovation. 

This began with an ambitious overhaul of its storage infrastructure eight years ago, according to Neill Smith, head of IT infrastructure at the ARE Directorate. Speaking to ITPro, Smith says the decision to embark on this transformation process was due to a changes to its subsidy application practices and the fact teams were wasting valuable time and resources maintaining existing infrastructure. 

Ditching the shackles of legacy hardware

Reforms and changes to subsidy applications meant development teams at the ARE Directorate were forced to build a raft of new applications to accommodate for new schemes and an increased volume in user traffic. 

“During our last big agricultural reform piece in 2014, we were revamping our subsidy based applications,” he says. “All of Europe did it.

“We were developing using new technologies both for applications and hardware, and we had traditional storage with Dell EMC. This was a large project, but what we noticed was that we had a large number of developers – circa 100 or thereabouts – and they were doing around four builds a day.”

Each of these builds, Smith explains, took an average of 30 minutes per developer, consuming a significant amount of time from each day. 

The reality for Smith was its existing storage infrastructure wasn’t able to contend with the scale of demand, and the pace of development. This was placing significant strain on the division. 

Farmers have a lengthy window to submit subsidies through the ARE site. However, in the run up to deadlines, there’s often a traffic surge, meaning performance is key. Combine this with the rapid pace of app development, and it was obvious change was required. 

With this in mind, the ARE Directorate began exploring alternative storage options, such as solid state drives (SSD), Smith says. After an extensive procurement process – that included a proof of value (PoV) that saw teams compare the performance of different solutions – the department selected Pure Storage’s FlashArray. This option won both in terms of performance and cost. “We’re all taxpayers here; we’re trying to drive good value,” he adds.

Organizational buy-in on hard mode

Smith notes while the storage transformation process was relatively streamlined, a key challenge the team encountered was emphasizing the benefits of the overhaul itself. In this way, working within a public sector environment, with taxpayer value in mind, presents different challenges compared to similar projects in the private sector. 

Some government departments can be inherently resistant to change, Smith suggests. “Sometimes it’s easy enough just to keep the lights on and not take risks,” he adds. However, in this instance, Smith was keen to drill home the long-term benefits that this overhaul could deliver for the developers, broader department, and, ultimately, the taxpayer. 

“The government is always resistant to change,” he says. “I think that’s the nature of the beast in a political world – and that’s a prevailing trend in any government. There’s a fear factor but I’m always on the opposite side of that.”

Smith recalls that framing the project as a value driver was critical to ensuring it had the necessary approval and backing. “It’s how you frame it,” he continues. “It’s about us being able to provide a better solution and use cool new tech. 

“It’s about creating the right culture and allowing people to fail and get things wrong. But in doing that, you’re allowing people to relax and deliver something that’s actually going to be fit for purpose rather than rushing through a solution.

“You might deliver it on time, but then it ultimately becomes a higher operational overhead because you’ve implemented something that’s not sound.”

Going against the grain on containerization

Smith tells ITPro the ARE Directorate’s current focus is on embracing containerization for core applications as part of what he describes as an “agnostic multi cloud approach”. 

The flexibility of containerization and the portability benefits it affords was something that the team had been considering for some time. Smith adds that while many organizations have traditionally went “all-in” with a specific hyperscaler, the ARE Directorate was keen to explore alternative options.

“We were looking at containerization, or the orchestration of containers, so Kubernetes was very much on our agenda,” he explains. “But we were seeing the bigger picture in terms of portability with containers. Having the ability to run that container when you want, where you want, was exciting.

“We were already on our AWS journey by then, but I wanted to explore if I could possibly look to do an agnostic approach to multi-cloud - so move a containerized workload on-premise on a virtual machine (VM) estate, running in OpenShift, then move that into AWS.”

For this, Smith once again engaged with Pure Storage, namely Portworx. The storage giant acquired the startup in 2020 in a bid to support and accelerate customers’ hybrid and multi-cloud strategies. The team conducted another PoV with Portworx and quickly realized there was scope to deliver marked improvements to flexibility and developer productivity. 

This proof of value involved taking a core application running on-prem, migrating it to AWS, and then Azure, before bringing it back on-prem. The entire process was completely in “around one and a half minutes”, he says. 

The Portworx roll-out took roughly two weeks , Smith adds, and has since unlocked significant value for the broader team in terms productivity, efficiency, cost, and, crucially, security. 

If a cloud provider encounters a security incident or breach, then workloads can be taken back on-prem to bolster safety. Similarly, in an era of rising cloud prices, the ability to take workloads back on-prem and avoid costly overheads is another key benefit, he says. 

Portwork now forms a core part of the ARE Directorate’s multi-cloud approach, Smith says. And, moving forward, the department sees the flexibility of multi-cloud as a means to drive further innovation, deliver long-term value for the division, and continue supporting the agriculture sector across Scotland. 

When designing the new PowerEdge T350 tower server, Dell EMC originally considered using the same chassis as the mighty T550. But SMBs said no – they wanted something much more space-efficient. And so it came to pass: the T350 introduces a brand-new mini-tower format that’s 37% smaller than its predecessor, the T340.

The size reduction doesn’t come at the cost of power. This single-socket server supports Intel’s Xeon E-2300 CPUs and up to 128GB of DDR4 memory, while eight internal LFF hot-swap drive bays offer plenty of storage potential. There isn’t an SFF drive cage option, but smaller SFF hard disks and SSDs can also be mounted in hybrid drive carriers.

While the PowerEdge T350 is a more lightweight server than the T550, it shares the exceptional build quality of its big brother. The chassis is constructed of sturdy pressed steel panels all round, with a weighty metal removable side, and sports Dell EMC’s trademark honeycomb front cover.

Pricing starts at a terrifically affordable £1,273: that gets you a quad-core 2.8GHz Xeon E-2314 CPU and 16GB of memory. There are plenty of other options, though, as the T350 supports all ten Xeon E-2300 CPUs. For our review we chose a faster 3.1GHz Xeon E-2324G and a variety of upgrades which we’ll discuss below, bringing the price to a still very reasonable £2,382.

The smaller chassis means there’s less working space inside than on the old T340, but with the side panel removed you’ll find everything neatly arranged and easy to access. Cooling is handled by a quiet 9cm fan at the rear, and the motherboard is covered by a solid plastic shroud to assist air flow. The CPU is fitted with a large passive heatsink, beneath which sit four DDR4 DIMM slots. We chose to install a single 32GB 3,200MHz module in one of these, leaving three available for future upgrades. Base systems are powered by a fixed 450W Bronze PSU, but beefier configurations such as ours can use dual hot-swap 600W Platinum PSUs.

Storage RAID options are plentiful. The motherboard comes with a basic S150 SATA controller, but you can choose from an extensive range of PERC adapter cards. Our system includes the entry-level PERC H345 SAS3/SATA card, which offers hardware-managed RAID0, 1 and 10 arrays; pricier 700-series adapters add RAID5 and 6, plus battery-protected cache memory. With the RAID card in place you’re still left with three spare PCI-E slots to play with, so you can also add a 10GbE card if the the T350’s dual Gigabit Ethernet ports don’t suffice for your needs.

One valuable feature passed down from the T550 is support for Dell EMC’s boot-optimised storage solution (BOSS) S2 card. This runs the operating system from a mirrored pair of M.2 SATA SSDs, allowing for maximum speed and resilience while freeing up the main drives for data storage. The SSDs are presented at the front in hot-swap carriers, and our server setup included the card and dual 240GB drives.

You also get the same excellent remote management features as on much bigger servers. Dell EMC’s embedded iDRAC9 controller provides tons of valuable information on server operations and hardware status through a slick web console. You can also monitor the server from a mobile device; we used the OpenManage iOS app on an iPad to view the server’s status, pull up a list of hardware and receive alerts on health issues. We went for an iDRAC9 Enterprise licence, which enables full OS remote control and virtual media services. We used the latter to attach a remote Windows Server 2022 ISO to the server and had the OS installed on the BOSS card in under 30 minutes.

The PowerEdge T350 is a fantastic little machine for SMBs and branch offices seeking a capable but affordable single-socket tower server. With support for a whole spread of Xeon E-2300 CPUs and a big helping of memory it can be specified to meet a wide range of needs, while the high storage capacity and plenty of expansion space provide room to grow.

Dell EMC PowerEdge T350 specifications

Dell EMC offers a remarkable range of PowerEdge rack servers for organisations of all sizes and its ‘xs’ family is designed to satisfy those with a narrower range of requirements and smaller budgets. The standard PowerEdge R650 is an impressive 1U rack server but businesses with small to mid-range workloads won’t want to pay extra for the privilege of having high-end options such as support for core-heavy Xeon Scalable Platinum CPUs, 4TB of memory, Intel PMEM 200 modules, triple GPU cards and water cooling.

The PowerEdge R650xs is a cost optimized version of the R650 and targets workloads such medium density virtualization, VDI, SDNs, database scale-out and HPC. Limiting the R650xs to 32-core Xeon Scalable Gold CPUs has extra cost benefits for VMware fans too, as it means they won’t have to step over the per-core licensing threshold.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R650xs review: Internal layout

At first glance, there’s little to differentiate the R650xs from its more powerful brother - although at 735mm deep, its chassis is shorter by around 75mm. You’ll find more differences under the lid, as the R650xs uses the same internal design as the previous generation of 1U rack server models.

To improve cooling for Platinum CPUs, the R650 uses a T-shaped motherboard so its PSUs can be positioned on each side of the chassis, whereas the R650xs keeps both PSUs in a single rear hot-plug bay on the left. Opt for a modest hardware specification and you can save even more cash by fitting low-cost 600W PSUs - which aren’t available for the R650.

All cooling is handled by a bank of fans arranged in front of the motherboard and the type will be determined by your choice of CPU. For modules up to a 165W TDP, you can specify standard fans, but as our system was supplied with a pair of 205W TDP 28-core Xeon Scalable Gold 6330 modules, it required a set of seven high-performance Gold fans.

The good news is there are no expansion restrictions, and the R650xs supports up to three PCI-E Gen 4 half-length, half-height cards – the same as the R650. There’s more, as underneath the central two-slot riser is an OCP 3 edge connector, and the price of our system includes a Broadcom dual-port 25GbE mezzanine card.

Dell EMC advised us that a lot of its customers don’t purchase more than 1TB of server memory so the number of DIMM slots has been halved to 16 to meet this upper limit. Our system was supplied with all its DIMM slots filled with 16GB DDR4 modules for a healthy total of 256GB.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R650xs review: Storage choices

General storage options are extensive; the R650xs can be ordered with four LFF, eight SFF or ten SFF front drive bays. While pricing up our system via Dell EMC’s online store, we found that if you choose a backplane that supports 10 front SAS/SATA bays or 10 NVMe SSDs, you can add a rear Flex Bay which provides room for two NVMe SSDs, although this does come at the cost of the central two-slot expansion riser.

RAID choices are extensive and start with the server’s embedded PERC S150 controller which provides software-managed RAID0, 1, 5 and 10 arrays for SATA devices. You can choose from a wide range of hardware RAID controllers and the price we’ve shown includes Dell EMC’s top-dog PERC H755 Front SAS card

Along with support for all popular RAID array types including RAID6 and 60, it sports 8GB of DDR4 cache memory and a battery backup unit (BBU). A feature which makes for a very tidy interior is the RAID card and BBU are neatly mounted in a dedicated space above the drive bays, plug directly into the backplane and connect to the motherboard with one cable.

The R650xs doesn’t support the latest BOSS (boot optimised storage solution) S2 card which presents dual M.2 SATA SSDs in removable carriers at the rear. Instead, it has a dedicated slot between its two expansion card risers where the older cold-swap BOSS S1 card nestles, and we’ve priced the system up with dual mirrored 480GB SSDs.

A cheaper alternative for running an embedded hypervisor is Dell EMC’s IDSDM (internal dual SD module). This fits into a dedicated slot on the motherboard, provides redundant storage and costs £253 for one with dual 64GB microSD cards.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R650xs review: Remote management

There are no compromises with remote management as the R650xs has the same Dell EMC iDRAC9 controller as its more well-endowed PowerEdge brethren. It presents a slick web console offering a wealth of information on system and component status, power usage and cooling efficiency along with a hardware inventory plus direct access to BIOS and storage configurations.

The optional Quick Sync 2 module is a great feature for support staff that want walk-up diagnostics on their mobile device. Using the OpenManage Mobile (OMM) app, you connect to it over Bluetooth and view all server information, alerts and the health status of hardware components.

We run the OpenManage Enterprise (OME) software in the lab as a Hyper-V VM and after it discovered the server’s iDRAC9, we could manage and monitor it, control power and run remote control sessions. Add an OME Enterprise Advanced license and you can use the Power Manager plug-in to view historical graphs of server power consumption plus thermals and as long as the server has a valid support contract, you can integrate OME with the free CloudIQ cloud hosted service to receive server telemetry and predictive analytics.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R650xs review: Verdict

Dell EMC’s PowerEdge R650xs is a great choice for businesses with moderate workloads to satisfy and a close eye on their budget. It may be a cost-optimised model but this superbly built 1U rack server offers a powerful specification at a good price, and has very few compromises for storage and expansion potential while remote management services are simply the best.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R650xs specifications

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Stepping in at the entry point of Dell EMC’s extensive range of rack servers, the PowerEdge R250 aims to offer SMBs an affordable solution that can handle a wide range of business applications. It packs a lot into its short-depth 1U chassis, bringing Xeon E-2300 processing power to the table along with a big helping of fast memory, plenty of storage options and room to grow.

Prices start at £950, which gets you a basic dual-core 3.5GHz Intel Pentium G6405T CPU partnered by 8GB of DDR4 memory. Our review system is a lot more powerful, as the price includes a quad-core 3.1GHz Xeon E-2324G CPU and 32GB of memory, which can be boosted to 128GB for memory-hungry workloads.

The R250 is restricted to a maximum of four front drive bays, but you can choose from LFF and SFF hard disks and SSDs, with the backplane in our system adding hot-swap capabilities. It was also equipped with an HBA355i PCIe adapter card, which doesn’t provide RAID but adds support for SAS3 storage.

If you want RAID there are plenty of choices, with the server supporting most of Dell EMC’s PERC controllers. The entry-level H345 offers stripes and mirrors for SATA and SAS devices, while the top-dog H755 brings RAID5 and 6 into the equation.

You can keep all the drive bays for storage duties by adding Dell EMC’s boot optimised storage solution (BOSS) S1 card, which has two M.2 SATA SSD slots and can be used as a mirrored array for running an operating system. It will cost you a PCIe slot, though, as the R250 doesn’t support the BOSS S2 version used by the higher-end PowerEdge servers that present two removable M.2 carriers at the rear for easier access.

A cheaper alternative that doesn’t occupy a PCIe slot is the internal microSD module (IDSDM) card. This also supports mirroring, fits in a dedicated motherboard slot and costs around £110 with a pair of 32GB cards.

The server presents a tidy interior with easy access to all key components for upgrades and maintenance. Four cold-swap fans look after the CPU, memory and the pair of PCIe 4 expansion slots, and we found the server runs very quietly.

The drive backplane connects to the HBA355i card with a single cable and is far tidier than the basic four-cable drive option. Note that the R250 supports a single Bronze or Platinum 450W PSU so you’ll need to consider the more advanced PowerEdge R350 if you want power redundancy.

For the best remote server management, however, look no further. The R250 sports Dell EMC’s iDRAC9 embedded controller with dedicated Gigabit port. Its slick web console provides a wealth of information on server operations, and you can use it to remotely configure RAID arrays and directly access its BIOS menus.

We run Dell EMC’s OpenManage Enterprise (OME) server in the lab, which we used to keep a close eye on the R250. Adding an OpenManage Advanced licence to its iDRAC9 console enabled the Power Manager plug-in for viewing system consumption and thermal values.

Larger businesses will love the free CloudIQ cloud-hosted service, which provides machine learning plus server telemetry and predictive analytics for all their Dell EMC systems. Functioning as a CloudIQ collector, OME sends telemetry and alert logs to it every 15 minutes, and the only requirement for the R250 is a valid support contract.

CloudIQ provided plenty of information on the R250, including a proactive health score, full hardware inventory and 24-hour performance views for CPU and memory utilisation, power consumption and temperatures. The views can be customised with filters, and we used the reports section to create custom performance dashboards for selected server metrics.

The PowerEdge R250 is a great entry-level rack server for SMBs, delivering a powerful hardware package at a good price. It offers plenty of expansion space, a high memory capacity and unbeatable remote management features.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R250 specifications

Growing SMBs that need an affordable and scalable entry-level rack server should head over to Dell EMC’s PowerEdge range. The R250 is a good starting point, but for those that want more storage options and greater expansion potential, the R350 on review is a worthy contender.

Along with room up front for four LFF or eight SFF hot-swap drives, this 1U rackmount server supports a choice of eight Dell PERC RAID cards – twice that of the R250. There’s more as it has enough internal real estate for Dell’s smart BOSS (boot optimised storage solution) S2 adapter card with dual hot-swap M.2 SSDs.

It’s also ideal for those with limited space as this 1U rackmount server has a short 585mm depth so it’ll slot into a wall-mount cabinet. This shortness doesn’t come at the cost of features either, as the R350 supports the entire family of ten Xeon E-2300 CPUs and has a maximum memory capacity of 128GB.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R350 review: Design and build

The R350 is very well-built. Removing the lid reveals a tidy interior with cabling neatly tucked away and unrestricted access afforded to all key hardware components. Underneath a plastic air shroud to the right, you’ll find the single CPU socket with the 6-core 2.9GHz Intel Xeon E-2336 in our system topped off with a solid passive heatsink.

The standard heatsink is rated for CPUs up to an 80W TDP so if you specify the 95W Xeon E-2386G or E2388G chips, you’ll get a larger one. To the side of the CPU are four DIMM slots and the price we’ve shown includes a single 32GB stick of 3,200MHz DDR4 memory, leaving three spare slots for boosting this to the maximum 128GB.

Cooling for all versions of the R350 is handled by a bank of four cold-swap, dual-rotor fan modules lined up in front of the motherboard. We initially found their noise levels quite noticeable but after playing around with the management settings and changing the default thermal fan profile to the Sound Cap option, this was reduced considerably.

The 350W hot-plug Bronze PSUs in the previous generation R340 have been upgraded in the R350 to more powerful 600W Platinum 80 Plus models. The server can be run with just one, but our configuration has dual PSUs for added redundancy.

The motherboard offers a pair of embedded Gigabit ports and further expansion is facilitated by a riser card with a PCI-E 4 slot on each side. Both accept half-length (HL), half-height (HH) cards with Dell offering dual or quad port Gigabit and dual copper or SFP+ 10-Gigabit adapters.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R350 review: Storage variables

The R350 supports twice as many PERC cards as the R250 because it has a mount point and connector on the drive backplane for a front RAID card with four versions available. Our system came with an entry-level PERC H345 Front Load adapter which provides SAS3 and SATA support along with hardware-managed RAID0, 1 and 10 arrays - the 700-series of adapters extend these to RAID5 and 6 plus battery protected cache memory.

The H345 card is cabled through to the motherboard and Dell has been quite clever here as there’s a dedicated PCI-E 4 PERC side slot below the riser cage. This has a dual purpose as it accepts standard adapter PERC (aPERC) cards while in our case, it was occupied by a simple front PERC (fPERC) pass-through card servicing the H345 adapter.

For general storage duties, we’ve included two 480GB SATA SSDs but Dell offers a big choice of SAS and SATA HDDs and SSDs. We can’t see many SMBs tempted by Dell’s high capacity models though, as they’re a bit pricey with a 4TB read-intensive SATA SSD costing nearly £3,000.

Still, you won’t need to use them for the operating system as the BOSS S2 card is designed specifically for this task. Tucked up next to the PSU bay, it presents two M.2 SATA SSD slots in hot-swap carriers that can be easily accessed from the rear and we’ve included one with dual mirrored 240GB SSDs.

A hypervisor hosting alternative to the BOSS S2 is Dell’s internal dual SD module (IDSDM) card which has two SD Card slots, supports mirroring and fits in a dedicated slot at the front of the motherboard. If you’re happy to run a hypervisor on a single USB stick, the slot also accepts Dell’s internal USB 3 card which only costs £26.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R350 review: Management choices

It may be an entry-level server but the R350 sports the same iDRAC9 remote controller and dedicated Gigabit port as its bigger PowerEdge brothers. Its smart web console presents a wealth of information on server operations plus a full hardware inventory and direct access to BIOS and storage configurations.

You can choose from five licenses - Basic and Express are very similar, with the latter adding real-time power and temperature graphing. If you want full remote OS control and remote media services though, you’ll need an Enterprise license, while the Datacenter option adds advanced services such as streaming telemetry.

All PowerEdge servers can be managed and monitored from the free OpenManage Enterprise (OME) software which we run in the lab as a Hyper-V VM. Adding an iDRAC9 OME Enterprise Advanced license enables the Power Manager plug-in and as long as you have a valid support contract, you can use the free CloudIQ cloud hosted service which provides server telemetry and predictive analytics.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R350 review: Verdict

The PowerEdge R350 will appeal to SMBs as this entry-level rack server combines Xeon E-2300 power with a high expansion potential, making it a good long-term investment. Storage options are plentiful too, and you won’t find better remote management facilities anywhere else either.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R350 specifications (as reviewed)

Dell EMC’s PowerEdge R550 is aimed squarely at SMBs that have processing power, storage capacity and expansion potential on their shopping list and a tight grip on the purse strings. This 2U rack server looks to deliver on all counts; along with support for dual Xeon Scalable CPUs, it offers a good range of storage features plus plenty of room to grow, and yet doesn’t cost much more that an equivalent 1U model.

It bears a number of similarities to the 1U PowerEdge R450 as it too is offered with a choice of seven Xeon Scalable Gen 3 CPUs. It has the same maximum 165W TDP thermal restriction but this still allows it to support up to 24-core Xeon Scalable Gold 5318Y CPUs - our system was supplied with one of these in residence.

Businesses with storage-centric workloads will find plenty to like here. The R550 supports SAS3 and SATA devices and has room up front for 8 LFF HDDs or 16 SSF HDDs and SSDs, and with 20TB SATA HDDs already available from Dell EMC, the R550 can present a very usable maximum capacity of 160TB.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R550 review: Internal design

The R550 presents a well-designed interior with easy access to all key components for upgrade and maintenance operations. Unlike Dell EMC’s higher-end rack servers such as the R650 and R750, it doesn’t have a T-shaped motherboard and keeps its pair of PSU bays over on the left side.

Entry-level systems can get away with dual 600W redundant PSU but stepping up to dual Gold CPUs will require 800W models. Dell EMC also offers 1,100W versions, although we can’t see many specifications requiring these – especially as the R550 doesn’t support GPU cards.

Cooling is handled efficiently by five hot-plug fans arranged in a removable tray in front of the motherboard. With one CPU in residence, we only needed the standard single rotor variety, whereas dual CPUs will require the high-performance Silver-Grade fan modules fitted.

Our Gold CPU was covered by a sturdy finned passive heatsink and the two sockets are partnered by 16 DIMM slots, with the price for our system including 128GB of memory spread across eight 16GB modules. The maximum memory is 1TB which is perfectly adequate for most businesses - in fact, Dell EMC informed us that it found few customers buy more than this.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R550 review: Storage and expansion

Our server was supplied with 8 LFF hot-swap drive bays across the front and you can specify either 8 or 16 SFF bays. For RAID, you can start with the embedded PERC S150 controller, which provides software-managed arrays, but the price we’ve shown includes Dell EMC’s top-dog PERC H755 Front SAS card.

Along with support for all popular RAID arrays types, it sports a big 8GB of DDR4 cache memory and comes with a battery backup pack. A feature which makes for a very tidy interior is that the RAID card is mounted above the drive bays, plugs directly into the backplane and connects to the motherboard with one cable.

Unlike the R450, the R550 supports Dell EMC’s latest BOSS (boot optimised storage solution) S2 card. This presents dual M.2 SATA SSDs in removable carriers at the rear and is ideal for loading an OS or hypervisor on, saving all the front bays for data storage.

At the rear are four PCI-E slots with each accepting a vertically mounted adapter card. Clearly, there’s plenty of room for more components with our single CPU activating one PCI-E 4 slot plus the PCI-E 3 version alongside, with the other two PCI-E 4 slots enabled when a second CPU is installed.

You probably won’t need the standard slots for network expansion though, as sitting in the middle is an OCP 3 mezzanine edge slot. The price we’ve shown includes a Broadcom dual 10GbE SFP+ card with other choices comprising multi-port Gigabit, 10GbE and 25GbE cards from Broadcom, Intel and Marvel.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R550 review: Management

The server’s embedded iDRAC9 controller sets the standard for remote management with its web console offering a wealth of information on all hardware components, system performance and thermal values. It provides direct access to BIOS or storage configurations and we’ve included a Datacenter license in the price, which activates everything the iDRAC9 has to offer, including remote console and virtual media services plus telemetry streaming for predictive analytics.

Dell-centric businesses will like the OpenManage Enterprise (OME) software which can monitor and report on PowerEdge servers, storage arrays and virtualization hosts. We run it in the lab as a Hyper-V VM and use it to check on system utilization, firmware compliance and warranty status.

We’ve also included an OME Advanced license for the R550 so it can send power usage statistics to the OME Power Manager plug-in. This adds group power consumption graphs to the OME dashboard page plus individual statistics for each server, with data being retained for up to a year.

Adding another plug-in to the OME host allows it to function as a collector for Dell EMC’s CloudIQ cloud monitoring service so it can send telemetry and alert logs to it for selected groups of servers, storage arrays and switches. CloudIQ requires all monitored systems to have a valid ProSupport contract and for the R550, the portal presented a proactive health score along with detailed lists of all hardware components plus a 24-hour performance view for all major elements.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R550 review: Verdict

The PowerEdge R550 is a fine choice for budget-conscious SMBs that want a versatile and powerful Xeon Scalable rack server. It has the storage density to satisfy data hungry applications and combines it with plenty of expansion potential and classy remote management features.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R550 specifications (as reviewed)

Businesses looking for an affordable rack server that can handle a wide range of general-purpose workloads will find the PowerEdge R450 could be just the ticket. Stepping up to the entry-point of Dell EMC’s dual-socket rack server family, the R450 targets SMB applications such as small IT infrastructure duties along with modest virtualisation services.

It packs a fine hardware package into its 1U height with plenty of processing power on tap thanks to a choice of seven Xeon Scalable Gen 3 CPUs. Our review system was furnished with a meaty pair of 24-core 2.1GHz Gold 5318Y modules – the highest the R450 can handle – but you can save a pile and opt for a more modest 8-core 2.8GHz Silver 4309Y.

Memory doesn’t see any real limits either, and the R450 can handle up to 1TB. Our system came tooled up for some memory-intensive action; the price includes a healthy 128GB of DDR4 memory spread across eight 16GB DIMMs.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R450 review: Storage options

The R450 is available with four hot-swap LFF drive bays or, in our case, eight SFF bays. The motherboard does have a basic embedded PERC S150 SATA controller for software-managed RAID arrays, but this is largely redundant as the R450 is offered with a choice of Dell EMC’s PERC hardware RAID cards which also bring SAS support into the equation.

Our server sports a PERC H745 Front SAS card which slots smartly into a dedicated bay right above the drive carriers, plugs directly into the backplane and is linked to the motherboard with a single cable. It supports all the usual RAID array suspects, including 5 and 6, plus it comes with a cache-protecting battery backup unit (BBU).

A good choice of SATA and SAS HDDs and SSDs are offered for the R450 but NVMe SSDs are off the menu. If you want these in 1U of rack space, you’ll need to consider moving up to the cost-optimised PowerEdge R650xs.

Dell’s BOSS (boot optimised storage solution) card does away with the need to put the OS on a hard disk but the R450 supports the older S1 version which doesn’t have the removable M.2 SSD carriers found in the later S2 model. The R450 has enough room between its two expansion card risers for a dedicated PCI-E slot where the BOSS-S1 card nestles, and we’ve priced the system up to include a pair of mirrored 480GB SSDs.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R450 review: Remote management

The R450 is blessed with Dell EMC’s iDRAC9 controller which sets the standard for remote management. Its smart web console presents a wealth of information on system and component status, power usage and cooling efficiency, along with a full hardware inventory plus direct access to BIOS and storage configurations.

Costing only £115, the Quick Sync 2 module is a must-have feature for support staff that want walk-up diagnostics on their mobile device. Using the OpenManage Mobile (OMM) iOS app on an iPad, we connected to it over Bluetooth by scanning the QR code on the server’s pull-out system tag.

From our iPad, we could view all server information, alerts and the health status of hardware components. Other useful tools include facilities to directly access the iDRAC9 web console and use its built-in VNC server to remotely control the server’s operating system.

We run the OpenManage Enterprise (OME) software in the lab as a Hyper-V VM and after it discovered the server’s iDRAC9, we could manage and monitor it, control power and run remote control sessions. With an OME Enterprise Advanced license added to our iDRAC9, we could use the Power Manager plug-in to view graphs of server power consumption and thermals going back up to a year.

As long as the server has a valid support contract, you can integrate it with the free CloudIQ cloud hosted service, which provides server telemetry and predictive analytics. Installing the CloudIQ plug-in allows OME to operate as a collector where it sends its logs every 15 minutes. This means CloudIQ can provide a proactive health score, hardware inventory and 24-hour performance graphs of CPU and memory utilisation, power consumption and temperatures.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R450 review: Internal design

Cracking the lid reveals a well-designed interior that afforded us easy access to all key components. The two Gold CPUs are topped off with chunky passive heatsinks and flanked by a total of 16 DIMM slots supporting up to 64GB RDIMM modules - although these bad boys will set you back over £1,600 apiece.

At the rear are two risers, each offering a PCI-E Gen 4 expansion slot for a low-profile, half-length adapter card. There’s room for further network expansion as sitting underneath the risers is an OCP 3 mezzanine edge slot. with Dell EMC offering a choice of multi-port Gigabit, 10GbE and 25GbE cards from Intel, Broadcom and Marvell.

The R450 supports dual PSUs and our system included two 800W Platinum models running in fault tolerant mode. Also available are high-power 1,100W PSUs, while systems with a single CPU can get away with cheaper 600W models.

Cooling is handled by a bank of seven standard cold-swap, dual rotor fans arranged behind the drive backplane and although they do a good job, we recommend ensuring there is unobstructed air flow around the server. We found the Gold 5318Y CPUs get quite hot during operation, with the iDRAC9 temperature monitor showing them running at 80℃ in idle.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R450 review: Verdict

The R450 is a good choice for SMBs and larger businesses that want a rack-dense solution for running a wide range of general-purpose applications - although if you choose the core-dense Gold CPUs, be mindful of cooling requirements. That aside, this 1U rack server offers a good specification for the price, and if remote server management is a high priority, then you’ve come to the right place.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R450 specifications (as reviewed)

As one of the first Gen3 Xeon Scalable servers to market, Dell EMC’s PowerEdge R750 set a very high standard and impressed us mightily when we exclusively reviewed it at its launch. It packs a truly remarkable specification into its 2U of rack height and offers a huge expansion potential as well.

The only issue with the R750 is it could be overkill for businesses that have more modest rack server requirements, as they could end up paying for features their workloads may never use. Not everyone needs core-heavy Xeon Scalable Platinum CPUs, a massive 8TB of system memory, Intel PMEM 200 modules or liquid-cooling, after all.

Enter the PowerEdge R750xs, which is designed for businesses that don’t need such a high-end specification, taking a lot of the goodness from the R750 and offering it as a more cost-optimised version. Along with large server scale-out projects, the R750xs targets more general customer workloads such as databases, virtualization, VDI and cloud services.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R750xs review: Hardware features

If you think the R750xs is a ‘hobbled’ version of the R750, you’d be very wrong. For starters, it can handle all Gen3 Xeon Scalable Gold CPUs right up to the 32-core 6338/6338N models and the price for our system includes a very serviceable pair of 20-core 2.3GHz Xeon Scalable Silver 4316 CPUs.

Dell EMC found many of its customers aren’t buying more than 1TB of memory, so that’s what the R750xs will support and our system came decked out with a healthy 512GB of DDR4 RDIMM memory spread across all 16 of its DIMM slots. Only those with very specific workloads and deep pockets would likely specify Intel Optane Persistent Memory, so support for these has been removed from the R750xs as well.

Further research found that only a small number of customers were buying more than 12 drives, so storage arrangements see some changes too. A quick glance at the front shows the R750xs on review retains the same 8+8+8 drive bay layout as the R750 - but options extend to 16 SFF SAS/SATA devices, with the third bay set aside for those that want NVMe SSDs.

If you need more room to maneuver, you can also specify either 8 or 12 LFF front drive bays, and an optional rear two-bay cage is available which supports HDDs and NVMe SSDs. This is in contrast to the R750, which supports two rear cages. Our server also has Dell EMC’s BOSS (boot optimized storage solution) S2 card which presents its two M.2 slots at the rear, with 480GB SATA SSDs fitted in removable hot-swap carriers for easy access.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R750xs review: Chassis design

The R750xs chassis is slightly shorter than its big brother and has a different internal design. Whereas the R750 employs a T-shaped motherboard which allows its PSUs to be placed on each side of the chassis for improved cooling, the R750xs keeps the older design, with the dual PSUs installed in one rear bay to the left.

Cooling isn’t a problem though, as the server is available with five standard hot-plug fan modules which can handle CPUs up to a 150W TDP. Higher specified systems require either Silver or Gold high-performance fans and there’s a sixth bay which will be fitted with an extra fan module if the rear drive cage is installed.

Expansion doesn’t see any major restrictions as the R750xs supports up to six PCI-E Gen 4 half-length, half-height cards with an OCP 3 edge connector lurking beneath the central 2-slot riser. The price of our system includes an Intel X710 dual-port 10GbE SFP+ OCP 3 card with Dell EMC also offering 10/25GbE mezzanine cards.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R750xs review: Management and CloudIQ

Remote server management is as excellent as we’ve come to expect from Dell EMC, and the server’s iDRAC9 controller offers a feast of features presented in its tidy web console. You can keep a close eye on all aspects of server operations, view performance, remotely configure RAID arrays and directly access its BIOS menus.

Dell EMC’s OpenManage Enterprise (OME) server provides a web console for managing all your servers, with the Power Manager plug-in adding system consumption and thermal monitoring. The free CloudIQ cloud hosted service goes even further by using machine learning to deliver server telemetry and predictive analytics for your entire Dell EMC infrastructure.

To use CloudIQ, we added its plug-in to our OME on-site installation, generated an access code and PIN and selected the OME device groups we wanted monitored. OME functions as a collector for CloudIQ, sending telemetry and alert logs to it every 15 minutes, and the only criteria for servers is they must have a valid support contract.

The CloudIQ portal opens with an overview of all monitored servers, storage arrays and switches, shows system health status and alerts while the cybersecurity feature identifies potential security violations. CloudIQ performs predictive analysis on storage pools and clusters and provides historical trending and timely warnings as to when capacities are likely to reach their limits.

Plenty of information was provided for our R750xs review server including a proactive health score, detailed lists of all hardware components and a 24-hour performance view for CPU and memory utilisation, power consumption and temperatures. The system performance page presents views of system level performance for all monitored devices which can be customized with filters while the reports section allowed us to create custom dashboards showing graphs and tables for selected server metrics.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R750xs review: Verdict

Businesses that want an affordable 2U rack server without all the extra bells and whistles will find Dell EMC’s PowerEdge R750xs fits the bill nicely. With support extending to all Gen 3 Xeon Scalable Gold CPUs and up to 1TB of memory, it’s capable of handling virtually any general-purpose workload, storage and expansion potential are both equally good and the system on review offers a fine specification for the price.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R750xs specifications (as reviewed)

The past twelve months have brought challenges for almost all businesses, but they’ve also brought some terrific products. New generations of servers and appliances have arrived, offering levels of horsepower and capacity that would have seemed outlandish just a few years ago. At the same time, value has continued to climb, bringing new possibilities within reach of an SMB budget.

There’s been plenty of exciting developments for end users too. Stunning laptops, tablets and phones have turned our heads, along with powerful printers, scanners and screens. And while threats like phishing and ransomware haven’t gone away, the latest generation of security software is here to keep us safe.

As always, there’s no such thing as a perfect product – every business and every individual will have their own needs and preferences. But we’ve put together our selection of the greatest releases of the past twelve months, to reveal the standout products across a wide range of categories, and to celebrate the manufacturers who’ve driven innovation forward in 2021.

Best laptop 2021

WINNER: LG Gram 17

Weighing just 1.35kg, the Gram 17 is barely heavier than many 14in laptops – yet it has a huge, bright 17in display that’s fantastic for productivity and on-the-go presentations.

There’s plenty of horsepower here too, with an 11th-generation Intel Core i7 processor and 16GB of RAM on board. With nearly 13 hours of battery life it won’t conk out half-way through the day, and a spacious keyboard and trackpad mean it’s also a pleasure to work on for extended periods. Throw in Thunderbolt 4 and Wi-Fi 6 and you have an excellent do-it-all, go-anywhere computer for a very reasonable £1,599 exc VAT.

Read our full LG Gram 17 review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Razer Book 13

Razer made its name with gaming laptops, but the company’s first business-friendly model is a big hit. It looks stylish yet serious, with a superb screen that challenges the MacBook Pro for brightness and colour quality. Performance is top-notch too, thanks to an Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor, and there’s a great selection of ports, including full-sized USB and HDMI connectors. At 1.4kg it’s a little weighty for a 13in laptop, but overall it’s a great, capable choice for an everyday working companion.

Read our full Razer Book 13 review

Best Chromebook 2021

WINNER: Acer Chromebook Spin 713

There are plenty of sub-£500 Chromebooks on the market, but Acer’s Chromebook Spin 713 feels like something much more expensive. Its 13.5in QHD screen has a comfortable 3:2 aspect ratio, and it flips all the way around so you can work in laptop, stand or tablet mode. Unusually, there’s an HDMI output too, giving you additional working options.

Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 round out the feature set, and with a total weight of just 1.2kg the Spin 713 is deliciously portable too. It would have been nice if Acer had given that beautiful screen an anti-glare coating, but when the rest of the package is this good we can live with a few reflections.

Read our full Acer Chromebook Spin review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5

The Flex 5 is another Chromebook with a 360º-rotating screen, though its 16:9 aspect ratio is best suited to conventional laptop-style usage. It’s slimmer and lighter than the Acer Spin 713, and its bright display is less reflective. Connectivity is well covered with both USB Type-A and Type-C ports, along with Wi-Fi 6; if you’re looking for a no-nonsense Chrome OS workhorse, you won’t be disappointed.

Read our full Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 5 review

Best tablet 2021

WINNER: Apple iPad Pro 12.9in

With Apple’s mighty M1 processor, the iPad Pro is fully as powerful as a MacBook Pro. And it has several advantages over the laptop: at 680g it’s less than half the weight, and the touchscreen makes for a slick, tactile experience. The 120Hz mini-LED display is stunning, and a battery life of around 13 and a half hours means you can keep working all through the day and beyond.

No doubt, the 12.9in format is bulky for a tablet, while the optional keyboard pushes up the weight – and the price, which is already steep at £916 exc VAT for the base model. Even so, this is unquestionably the best tablet on the market: it doesn’t just excel at tablet tasks, it redefines what a tablet can do.

Read our full Apple iPad Pro 12.9in review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Nokia T20

It’s short on flashy gimmicks, but Nokia’s T20 feels like a professional tablet. The aluminium build is strong and sturdy, performance and features are up to par, and while we felt the 10.4in screen looked a little cold, its 5:3 aspect ratio is very comfortable to work on. The most impressive part is the price – just £150 exc VAT for the Wi-Fi 5 edition, or £167 exc VAT for the LTE model.

Read our full Nokia T20 review

Best smartphone 2021

WINNER: Apple iPhone 13

The iPhone 13 improves on last year’s iPhone 12 models with better cameras and a bigger battery, adding nearly two hours of daily performance in our tests. You get more storage in the standard model too, up from 64GB to 128GB, and the latest Apple A15 Bionic CPU for true Android-smashing performance.

All the usual iPhone strengths are here, including an excellent screen and a vast library of high-quality apps for work or play. It’s hardly an adventurous update from the iPhone 12, but if you’re choosing a new smartphone today – and aren’t already enmeshed in the Android ecosystem – then the iPhone 13 is the obvious choice.

Read our full Apple iPhone 13 review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: OnePlus 9 Pro

Standing 163mm tall, the OnePlus 9 Pro is large, but it’s perhaps the most beautiful Android smartphone we’ve seen, with a tiny bezel and beautifully textured case. Its 120Hz AMOLED display is a joy to behold, and a collaboration with Hasselblad ensures excellent photo and video quality. Performance is very strong too, courtesy of a top-tier Snapdragon 888 processor; at £829 exc VAT it’s not a budget option, but you get what you pay for.

Read our full OnePlus 9 Pro review

Best desktop server 2021

WINNER: HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus

The MicroServer Gen10 Plus really can fit happily on a desktop, as its square chassis measures a mere 245mm along each side. Yet it’s powerful enough to run a wide range of business services, with your choice of a dual-core 3.8GHz Pentium Gold G5420 CPU or a quad-core 3.4GHz Xeon E-2224. Four integrated LFF SATA drive bays allow for plenty of storage.

The small size means there’s not much scope for internal expansion, but you do get a single PCI-E x16 slot, and remote management can be added via the cheap iLO5 enablement kit. With the entry-level diskless system starting at just £395 exc VAT, it’s an excellent SMB-friendly deal.

Read our full HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Dell EMC PowerEdge T550

The T550 is a real “tower of power” – we tested it with a 12-core 2.1GHz Xeon Silver 4310 CPU, but if you need more grunt it can handle twin CPUs with up to 32 cores each. It also supports up to 24 SFF or eight LFF drives, and a maximum of 1TB of DDR4 RAM. Dell’s comprehensive iDRAC9 remote management platform comes as standard, making this an ideal answer to demanding workloads.

Read our full Dell EMC PowerEdge T550 review

Best 1U server 2021

WINNER: Dell EMC PowerEdge R650

Dell’s latest PowerEdge R650 design crams an amazing amount of potential into a 1U chassis. It supports Xeon Scalable CPUs with up to 40 cores and a massive 4TB of memory, with space inside for up to ten SFF drives and 16 Intel Optane modules to accelerate performance.

If that’s not enough, you also get three PCI-E Gen4 x16 slots and an OCP 3.0 edge slot, plus Dell’s BOSS card for fast booting from SSD media. And as usual with Dell, the iDRAC9 controller provides terrific remote management. It’s not a budget option – our review unit came to £15,417 exc VAT – but the PowerEdge R650 is an incredibly powerful and space-efficient server.

Read our full Dell EMC PowerEdge R650 review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Broadberry CyberServe Xeon

This low-profile server offers a solid chunk of power for just under £1,000. That gets you a quad-core Intel Xeon E-2224 CPU with 16GB of RAM – upgradeable to 128GB – and you’re free to fit your own drives in the four SFF bays and twin M.2 SSD slots. The single PCI-E Gen3 x16 slot can be used to add 10GbE networking, and the Asus motherboard supports web-based management, including full OS remote control and virtual media services as standard.

Read our full Broadberry CyberServe Xeon E-RS100-E10 review

Best 2U server 2021

WINNER: Broadberry CyberServe SP2 208-8I G3

The CyberServe SP2 208-8I G3 is designed for a hardcore server role. The system we tested came with a pair of 36-core Xeon Scalable Platinum CPUs, 512GB of DDR4 RAM, five 960GB SATA SSDs and eight 128GB Intel Optane PMEM 200 modules. This allows for insanely fast storage access – and to help you make the most of it, the system comes with not one but two dual-port Intel 100GbE network cards.

You can upgrade even further by going up to 26 SFF drives in total, plus eight NVMe drives, and the spacious 2U design allows for six free PCI-E Gen4 slots. It’s a magnificent hardware package, and while the £21,895 price tag won’t be within everyone’s budget, it’s superb value for what you get.

Read our full Broadberry CyberServe SP2 208-8I G3 review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Dell EMC PowerEdge R750

Dell’s PowerEdge R750 comes in three versions – the R750xa is built for GPU-based workloads, while the R750xs is a cost-optimised version aimed at specific roles. The standard R750 is a great all-rounder though: the configuration we tested offered two 28-core 2GHz Xeon Scalable Gold 6330 CPUs and 1TB of RAM, upgradeable to a whopping 8TB using 256GB DIMMs. For storage you can choose between a 12-bay LFF backplane or a 16-bay SFF one, and add up to 24 NVMe SSDs. In short, there’s enough power and flexibility here for any business.

Read our full Dell EMC PowerEdge R750 review

Best storage array 2021

WINNER: HPE MSA 2060 Storage

With numerous hardware upgrades over the last generation, this is HPE’s fastest dedicated storage array ever. It’s also laden with powerful features: thin provisioning, snapshots and volume copies are all supported, along with striped SSD caches, RAID10, 5 and 6 options and HPE’s own MSA-DP+ array format, designed for improved performance and faster rebuild times.

The MSA 2060 even offers zero-configuration data tiering, automatically shunting data between regular SAS drives, fast solid-state storage and low-priority ML-SAS volumes according to usage. And it’s all configured and managed from a simple web portal, so there’s no need to be a storage expert to get the best from it.

Read our full HPE MSA 2060 Storage review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Qnap TS-h2490FU QuTS Hero Edition

When performance is a priority, pure NVMe storage is the way to go. This impressive appliance can take up to 24 hot-plug U.2 drives, while Qnap’s 128-bit ZFS-based OS provides enterprise-class data integrity, with compression and deduplication options provided as standard. It’s all based on a powerful AMD EPYC processor, and it comes with a pair of dual-port 25GbE network cards, to ensure you can get the full performance from your storage.

Read our full Qnap TS-h2490FU QuTS Hero Edition review

Best NAS drive 2021

WINNER: Qnap TS-h973AX

Though it looks unassuming, Qnap’s TS-h973AX runs the company’s advanced QuTS hero OS, which offers an impressive range of native storage features. Those include fast, near-unlimited snapshots, transparent self-healing of data corruption and inline data deduplication and compression to make the most efficient use of your storage. Five LFF SATA bays plus four SFF bays provide plenty of room for expansion, while 10GbE and twin 2.5GbE network ports provide high-speed connections to the outside world.

In our tests the TS-h973AX provided fast read and write speeds, and there’s a whole library of apps to expand its capabilities, including backup and virtualisation tools. Costing just over £1,000 exc VAT for the diskless enclosure, it’s well within reach of smaller businesses.

Read our full Qnap TS-h973AX review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Qnap TS-873A

Looking for a simple storage solution? The eight-bay TS-873A makes a great platform for Qnap’s lightweight, simple to manage QTS OS. Alternatively, for more advanced data-protection functions you can install the full QuTS hero OS and make use of all the same features as the TS-h973AX, above. Either way, it’ll run the full range of Qnap apps, and dual 2.5GbE ports help keep data flowing swiftly in and out.

Read our full Qnap TS-873A review

Best printer 2021

WINNER: Epson EcoTank ET-5880

Forget about overpriced cartridges – this A4 MFP uses bottled ink that works out to just 0.2p per mono page and 0.8p for colour. That alone will make it attractive to busy offices, but the ET-5880 has other strengths too, including a swish 10.9cm touchscreen, 802.11n wireless connectivity and excellent colour output. It comes with a pair of 250-sheet paper cassettes, so you won’t be continually restocking it, and the integrated scanner has its own 50-page duplex ADF.

The one caveat is a print speed of 25ppm in standard quality mode: that’s not exactly slow, but it’s unexceptional for a modern office printer. Even so, the Epson’s user-friendliness and phenomenally low running costs make it our top choice for 2021.

Read our full Epson EcoTank ET-5880 review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Kyocera Ecosys

This freestanding laser MFP won’t suit the smallest offices, but it offers a 35ppm print speed and a wide range of downloadable apps to extend its printing and scanning functions. It’s easy to operate, with a big 7in touchscreen, a range of mobile apps and a clear web-based management console. The clincher is the price: the basic model with wired networking and a single 250-page sheet feeder costs just £696 exc VAT, and low-cost consumables work out to a very reasonable 1p per mono page.

Read our full Kyocera Ecosys M6235cidn review

Best scanner 2021

WINNER: Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1600

This desktop scanner has a great set of features, including integrated Wi-Fi, a 50-sheet ADF, double-sided scanning and a 4.3in colour touchscreen. It’s fast too: we were impressed to see it rip through our pile of test documents at 43ppm, creating 200dpi scans that were perfectly clear and clean enough for OCR and archival.

Even better, this hardware is partnered by one of the best software suites around. You can scan to a huge range of applications and cloud services, send scans directly to an email address or beam them to a mobile device. For anyone who needs to scan and share documents in a digital or cloud-first environment, the Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1600 is a terrific choice.

Read our full Fujitsu ScanSnap iX1600 review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Canon imageFormula DR-S130

With its output tray folded away the DR-S130 takes up barely any more desk space than a sheet of A4. Yet it scans at a swift 30ppm, and thanks to Canon’s CaptureOnTouch V4 Pro software it can perform all the same scan functions as much pricier, bulkier models. You can set up profiles for different job types, run single- and double-sided scans, perform OCR and save the output in your choice of format and location. The only thing it can’t do is scan directly to cloud services, but for most individuals and SMBs it’ll fit the bill admirably.

Read our full Canon imageFormula DR-S130 review

Best monitor 2021

WINNER: Dell UltraSharp 25 USB-C

We don’t see a lot of 25in monitors, but the format works well for desktop productivity, and the Dell UltraSharp lives up to its name with a crisp 2,560 x 1,440 resolution. It also delivers excellent coverage of both the sRGB and DCI-P3 colour spaces, with an HDR400 certification for extended-range colour.

The final trump card is connectivity: the USB Type-C connector can handle both incoming video and outgoing power, so you can hook your laptop up to the big screen and charge it at the same time. It’s also possible to daisy-chain a second display via the DisplayPort connector, or to swivel the panel round through 90º and work in portrait mode. In short, it’s one of the cleverest monitors we’ve seen.

Read our full Dell UltraSharp 25 USB-C review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Acer ConceptD CP5271UV

The CP5271UV is an exceptionally versatile monitor. It offers custom display modes for print editing, video and games, and also supports high-end features including HDR600 for deep-colour content, dynamic refresh rates up to 170Hz and an incandescent peak brightness of 480cd/m2. It makes a great office monitor too, with integrated gigabit Ethernet and four USB 3.1 ports. At £667 exc VAT it’s considerably more expensive than your typical desktop display, but if you're in the market for a high-end screen it’s a steal.

Read our full Acer ConceptD CP5271UV review

Best endpoint security suite 2021

WINNER: Sophos Intercept X Advanced

There’s a lot of hype around artificial intelligence, but it does have real applications: Sophos’ Intercept X suite uses machine-learning techniques to recognise malware and neutralise zero-day threats. It also includes a full range of traditional protections, defeating ransomware by intercepting encryption attacks and silently restoring the original file, and preventing data leaks by blocking the transmission of certain types of information.

The Advanced subscription adds an analysis centre, where you can forensically review attempted attacks, allowing you to identify and plug the gaps in your armour. It’s easy to deploy and manage too: a central web console lets you email out installer links to all clients, and then administer policies and settings for the whole site.

Read our full Sophos Intercept X Advanced review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud Plus

Kaspersky’s highly flexible licensing lets you protect workstations, laptops, servers and mobile devices all within a single subscription. As well as blocking viruses and intrusion attempts, the software can watch over your network for suspicious activity, and manage Windows Updates from a central portal. The premium Plus subscription adds the Security for Microsoft 365 component, which integrates into Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint Online and Teams, providing monitoring and protection for your services as well as your endpoints.

Read our full Kaspersky Endpoint Security Cloud Plus review

Best antivirus suite 2021

WINNER: Kaspersky Internet Security

Kaspersky is no stranger to our awards, and this latest version of its security suite shows why – in multiple independent tests it scored perfect 100% protection scores without a single false positive. Other notable features include browser protection, ransomware blocking, defences against webcam hijacking and even a fully featured firewall.

Do you need to pay for this type of protection? It’s true that Windows’ built-in security modules are nowadays very effective on their own. However, Kaspersky is much easier to configure, especially when it comes to customising firewall rules. It also has less of an impact on system performance, which makes the modest £15/yr subscription fee easy to swallow.

Read our full Kaspersky Internet Security review

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Avast Antivirus Free

Avast is our favourite free antivirus solution for several reasons. First, it does a great job of blocking malware: independent labs have found its protection on par with Microsoft Defender and ahead of several paid-for suites. What’s more, it’ll run on older editions of Windows – which is ideal if you still have legacy machines running Windows 7 or 8.1 that can’t be upgraded. You do have to put up with a few in-application adverts for Avast’s paid-for products, but if you can’t use Windows’ built-in protections – or just don’t want to – then Avast Antivirus Free makes a lightweight and effective alternative.

Read our full Avast Antivirus Free review

Dell EMC’s PowerEdge servers are now in their 15th generation – and the choice is bigger than ever, with 17 new and refreshed systems in the latest lineup. Tower servers in particular have been revamped, with the PowerEdge T550 stepping up to replace the trusty T640.

As you’d expect, the T550 is built on Intel’s third-generation Ice Lake platform. Our system came with a 12-core 2.1GHz Xeon Silver 4310 CPU, but the motherboard can take two processors with TDPs of up to 220W TDP, meaning you can go all the way up to 32-core CPUs.

Decked out in slinky silver, the T550 chassis is slightly smaller and quieter than the old T640 enclosure. This does mean that storage capacity is slightly reduced: where the T640 had space inside for up to 32 SFF hard disks, the T550 supports a maximum of 24 SFF or eight LFF drives, with an option to add up to eight NVMe SSDs, plus a 5.25in bay.

Another change is that the PERC RAID controllers have been moved off the motherboard and into dedicated slots on the drive backplane. Our system came with a Gen10 PCI-E 3 PERC H745 SAS3/SATA model, but other configurations include PCI-E 4 Gen11 PERC H755 adapters, which provide the higher bandwidth needed to take full advantage of hardware NVMe RAID arrays.

The BOSS (“boot-optimised storage solution”) card – which lets you run the OS from mirrored M.2 SATA SSDs – moves too. The new S2 model presents itself at the front of the case, where the SSDs are fitted in removable hot-swap carriers.

What hasn’t changed is build quality. The chassis is exceptionally well put together, not to mention heavy – the removable steel side panel alone tips the scales at nearly 3.5kg. Inside, the design affords easy access for upgrades and maintenance. The Silver CPU in our system is fitted with a solid passive heatsink, and a heavy plastic air shroud covering the entire motherboard has allowed Dell EMC to get rid of the two rear fans of the T640. In their place, regular T550 systems have a vertical bank of four hot-plug fans behind the drive backplane, which can be supplemented with four more in higher-performance systems.

As for memory, the twin CPU sockets are flanked by eight DIMM slots. The price we’ve shown includes 64GB of 3,200MHz DDR4 memory, but you can take the T550 up to a maximum of 1TB. Networking is handled by dual embedded Gigabit Ethernet ports, but if you want to step up to 10GbE there’s plenty of room for expansion cards, as the T550 offers a whopping five PCI-E 4 x16 slots. Even better, the server also has an OCP 3 mezzanine edge slot, which allows open-standard network cards to slot in at the back without the need to remove the side panel.

Remote management has long been a strength of Dell EMC’s servers, and here the embedded iDRAC9 presents a wealth of operational data via a slick web interface. Platform security is tight, as firmware packages must be cryptographically signed, and in the price above we’ve included the Enterprise upgrade, which enables remote control and virtual media services.

You can also use the Quick Sync 2 module to manage the server from an iOS or Android device, using the OpenManage Mobile app to connect over Bluetooth. We had no problems connecting to the T550 from an iPad, and using the app to monitor the server and receive alert notifications on health issues.

The PowerEdge T550 is a superbly designed tower server that’s ideally suited to businesses with demanding workloads. You can configure it to deliver as much power as you’re likely to need, and it comes with great management tools at a very tempting price.

Dell EMC PowerEdge T550 specifications

Dell EMC is bringing high-density processing to a rack near you, thanks to a new PowerEdge R650 model which squeezes a remarkable specification in a low-profile 1U chassis. As you’d expect, support for Intel’s 3rd-generation Xeon Scalable CPUs gets top billing, but the R650 offers a lot more besides, including a sharp focus on improved internal design, increased expansion and more storage choices.

The system on review showcases these features nicely, and was supplied to us with a pair of 28-core 2GHz Intel Xeon Scalable Gold 6330 CPUs. Providing you’re prepared to limit your storage and expansion ambitions, it can also handle Intel’s top-dog 40-core Platinums and their thirsty 270W TDPs.

We also received a generous 256GB of 2,933MHz DDR4 memory, with the R650 supporting a maximum capacity of 2TB with RDIMMs and 4TB when using LR-DIMMs – but note that the R650xs model is optimised for virtualized environments and only has 16 DIMM slots. The R650 also supports up to 16 Intel Optane PMEM 200 modules and our system came with eight 128GB sticks nestling between the DIMM modules.

General storage options look good too, as along with a wide choice of embedded RAID controllers, the chassis can handle up to ten standard SAS/SATA SFF HDDs and SSDs, as well as NVMe SSDs. As with the older R640, it has room at the back for another 2-bay cage which also supports NVMe SSDs.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R650 review: Internal layout

Cracking the R650’s lid reveals a similar layout to the PowerEdge R750, as it too sports a T-shaped motherboard. Locating the PSUs on each side of the chassis reduces hotspots and the R650 uses smaller form-factor models, which allows extra exhaust lanes to be created to assist with CPU cooling.

All cooling is handled by a bank of fans in front of the motherboard and the type will be determined by a number of factors. Standard fans can be used if the CPUs have TDPs up to 165W, but the presence of the 205W TDP Gold 6330 CPUs and PMEM 200 memory in our system requires a bank of eight high-performance Gold fans. High power CPUs have slightly different T-shaped heatsinks that extend an extra radiator bar across their attendant bank of four fans. Dell EMC also offers a direct liquid cooling (DLC) kit for the R650 that features proprietary leak detection systems and shutdown services.

Overall, the internal design is very tidy, with the R650 affording easy access to all components for maintenance and upgrades. It’s put the extra room to good use too, as it offers a big memory boost over its predecessor with the DIMM slot count going from 24 to 32. On top of that, it supports 16 PMEM modules as opposed to 12.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R650 review: Expansion and management

Expansion sees big improvements as well: along with three x16 PCI-E 4 slots, there’s room for an OCP 3.0 mezzanine edge slot, extending support to open-standard network cards from other partners, as well as Dell’s own offerings. RAID options get a major update too, as a dedicated slot on the backplane hosts the new PCI-E 4 PERC 11 controllers. We have the PERC H755 front SAS model on test, but other options include the PERC H755N, which allows the server to present a full house of NVMe SSDs.

The smaller PSUs also free up enough space to tuck the new BOSS (boot optimized storage solution) S2 card into the right-hand corner of the chassis. Conveniently, its dual M.2 SATA hot-swap carriers can be easily accessed from the rear without disturbing the server.

Speaking of convenience, remote server management doesn’t get any better than this, and the iDRAC9 controller offers a wealth of valuable features presented in a tidy web console. You can keep a close eye on all aspects of server operations, view performance and directly access its BIOS menus. Meanwhile, Dell EMC’s OpenManage Enterprise (OME) software presents a central console for managing all your servers with the Power Manager plug-in adding system consumption and thermal monitoring. The new CloudIQ hosted service even goes one step beyond this, linking up with OME via a plug-in and providing machine learning and predictive analytics for your entire infrastructure.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R650 review: PMEM 200 features and performance

You’re spoilt for choice when it comes to configuring Intel’s Optane PMEM 200 modules. They can be set up from the server’s BIOS boot menu, the iDRAC9 remote web management console, Windows PowerShell or Intel’s open-source IPMCTL utility. In all cases, you set your goal and choose between Memory Mode, App Direct or a mixture of both and set percentages for each mode. In App Direct mode, the R650 supports the BIOS-level option to apply encryption and passphrase protection to secure their contents.

To test pure PMEM storage performance, we created two interleaved App Direct regions each using four Optane modules so they were spread equally across the CPU’s memory channels. With Windows Server 2019 at the helm, we could see two 504GB persistent memory disks, which we used to create a single Storage Space with one mirrored virtual disk.

Performance is simply stunning. Iometer reported raw sequential read and write speeds of 47.6GB/sec and 3.8GB/sec, with random speeds settling at 41.8GB/sec and 3.9GB/sec. Dropping down to 4KB blocks saw great throughput numbers; Iometer returned sequential read and write rates of 1,110,655 and 773,160 IOPS while random operations returned 1,083,330 and 739,288 IOPS.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R650 review: Verdict

Organisations that want more power to their racks will find the PowerEdge R650 presents a great combination of high-performance CPUs, expansion potential and storage features in a space-saving 1U chassis. Internal design is exemplary, remote management features just keep on getting better and we found Intel’s Optane PMEM 200 modules in App Direct mode deliver a staggering storage performance.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R650 specifications (as reviewed)

Multi-node servers are perfect for data centers demanding ever greater compute densities without an increase in real estate and Dell EMC's PowerEdge C-Series of rack servers have traditionally offered an appealing solution. Built around its trusty C6400 chassis, they support up to four independent compute nodes and the PowerEdge C6520 brings Intel's 3rd Generation 'Ice Lake' Xeon Scalable CPUs to the table.

The C6520 nodes are the dual-socket (2P) variety and support every Xeon Scalable model right up to Intel's mighty 40-core 2.3GHz Platinum 8380. Processing density isn't as high as Dell EMC's AMD-based PowerEdge C6525 but Intel shops will appreciate being able to cram up to 320 physical and 640 logical cores into only 2U of rack space.

The C6520 targets a wide range of enterprise workloads such as HPC, massive parallel computing, financial modelling, high-frequency trading and, of course, server consolidation. For those that require a more scalable performance, reduced operating costs and lower cooling requirements, the C6520 can be deployed as a rack dense solution for 1P workloads.

Dell EMC PowerEdge C6520 review: C6400 chassis

The C6400 chassis has seen an extensive tour of duty: it's the same as employed by the PowerEdge C6525 and also the 14th Gen PowerEdge C6420 which was first launched back in 2017. In reality, there isn't much that needs changing as its primary functions are to provide power to the nodes along with storage backplane services.

The chassis uses a central mid-plane management board to distribute power to the nodes and Dell EMC offers a wide range of hot-plug PSUs. The review server was supplied with dual 2,000W PSUs, but 1,600W, 2,400W and 2,600W versions are also available.

Our system had 24 SFF drive bays (a 12-bay LFF model is also available) and each node gets an equal share of drives which, in the standard configuration, can be all SAS3/SATA, with the first two bays of each group also supporting NVMe SSDs. Note, however, that this is a legacy mixed-mode backplane and only offers PCI-e 3 speeds, whereas the new all-NVMe backplane delivers PCI-e 4 performance.

The air-cooled version of this chassis uses four cold–swap fans but has a number of thermal restrictions, as most Xeon Scalable CPUs with TDPs of 235W and above are not supported in DP configurations. However, Dell EMC offers a DLC (direct liquid cooling) option which is up to four times more efficient than air-cooling and removes all thermal restrictions.

Dell EMC PowerEdge C6520 review: Nodes

Our review system was supplied with a single node equipped with dual 2.1GHz 36-core Xeon Scalable Platinum 8352V CPUs which are optimised for virtualization duties. Their 195W TDP puts them on the right side of any thermal restrictions and CPU 1 was also fitted with the extended heatsink kit which provides an extra 5℃ of leeway for continuous operating temperatures.

The CPU sockets are flanked on each side by four DIMM slots and ours were all populated by 16GB 3,200MHz DDR4 RDIMM modules. Memory capacity can be boosted to 1TB using RDIMMs and 2TB with LR-DIMMs.

Expansion potential is good, as the nodes have two PCI-e Gen 4 slots, although the extended heatsink loses one of them. No matter; underneath this is an OCP 3.0 mezzanine card edge slot which accepts open-standard OCP 3.0 network cards from other partners, as well as Dell EMC's own Gigabit, 10GbE, 25GbE and 100GbE adapters.

The node's embedded S150 controller supports SATA devices and offers software-managed stripes, mirrors and RAID5 arrays but SAS3 support will require an additional PERC controller to be fitted. The C6520 supports a good range, with the top dog PERC H745 RAID card supporting SATA/SAS devices and offering plenty of RAID array options.

For workloads that don't require much storage, you can specify a C6400 chassis without a backplane, which will improve your thermal outlook as airflow is less restricted. The nodes have a dedicated slot at the rear which supports a BOSS-S1 (boot optimized storage subsystem) dual M.2 SATA adapter, which provides mirrored storage for running an OS.

Dell EMC PowerEdge C6520 review: Remote management

The C6520 nodes come with a single Gigabit LOM (LAN on motherboard) card, which slots in underneath the right expansion riser and can be shared with the embedded iDRAC9 controller. Remote management features are tops, and the iDRAC9 web console provides a wealth of information about hardware health plus operational status - and unlike Dell EMC's AMD-powered servers, you also get the System page performance tab, which provides graphs of CPU, memory and I/O utilization.

Multiple servers and nodes can be centrally managed using Dell EMC's OpenManage Enterprise (OME). We run the latest v3.4 in the lab as a Hyper-V VM and used its discovery service to add our C6520 node, after which we could view its vital signs, remotely control it and employ OME's firmware services to ensure it was running the latest version.

For more control, the OME Power Manager plug-in is a worthy addition as it can be used to pull up historical views of power consumption and thermal values going back up to a year. Even better, it can enforce per-rack power cap and thermal event-based policies while its EPR (emergency power reduction) feature can apply a low power mode to all group members to control consumption and if necessary, gracefully shut them all down.

Dell EMC PowerEdge C6520 review: Verdict

The PowerEdge C6520 may not be able to match the monstrous core density offered by the AMD-based PowerEdge C6525 but it still packs an impressive amount of Gen3 Xeon Scalable power into a rack-friendly 2U chassis. Available in air and liquid cooled configurations, the nodes are well designed with good expansion potential, while remote management features are simply the best - a great choice for high performance or hyperscale workloads and Intel houses with big server consolidation plans.

Dell EMC PowerEdge C6520 specifications (as reviewed)

The server market has seen some big changes recently. but Dell EMC looks set to shake it up even further with the largest product launch in its history. The 15th-generation PowerEdge family comprises 17 new and refreshed models and in this hands-on review, we look at the latest version of its trusty 2U data centre workhorse.

As expected, the PowerEdge R750 supports Intel’s 3rd Generation ‘Ice Lake’ Xeon Scalable CPUs which finally give AMD’s well-established EPYC chips some serious competition. Employing a 10nm architecture, they range from 8 to 40 cores and up to 64 PCI-E 4 lanes per socket, support DDR4 memory speeds up to 3,200MHz and claim an average 46% performance improvement over the previous generation for common data centre workloads.

Three versions of the R750 are available, but we’re focusing on the standard general-purpose model. The R750xa is built for GPU-based workloads and claims the highest density of GPUs in a 2U rack server while the R750xs is a cost-optimized version aimed at specific customer workloads.

The R750 presents a radical redesign over the R740 with a sharper focus on internal cooling. Storage capacities stay the same, with a maximum of 28 SFF bays available, but NVMe SSDs get some serious attention and expansion potential receives a massive boost.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R750 review: Internal layout

Internally, the R750 has a similar layout to the AMD-based PowerEdge R7525 as its T-shaped motherboard allows the PSUs to be placed on each side of the chassis. This improves air flow through the chassis so there are no hot spots and on the 1U R650 model, it creates extra exhaust lanes to help cool the CPUs.

Dell EMC’s multi-vector cooling creates streamlined pathways so air can be directed where it’s needed most using automation or user-defined profiles. These features aim to reduce the need for expensive liquid-cooling but in rack dense environments where heat dissipation is a major requirement, you can specify direct liquid cooling (DLC) kits that feature proprietary leak detection systems and shutdown services.

A bank of six hot-plug cooling fans are arranged in front of the motherboard and our server came with the Silver series modules. If you want the core-dense, high TDP Xeon Scalable Platinum 8300 CPUs, you’ll need to specify the higher performing Gold fans.

General internal design is very tidy with the two 28-core 2GHz Xeon Scalable Gold 6330 CPUs in our system laid out neatly across the chassis, mounted with solid passive heatsinks and flanked by 16 DIMM slots per socket. The price of our server includes 1TB of DDR4 RDIMM currently upgradeable to 2TB, while the maximum 8TB can be achieved with a full house of 256GB LRDIMMs or sixteen of Intel’s latest Optane 200 persistent memory modules.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R750 review: Storage features

The R750 offers an extensive range of storage options that start with a 12-bay LFF hot-swap backplane for SAS3/SATA devices. We have the model with the 16-bay SAS/SATA SFF backplane and Dell EMC provided eight 2.4TB SAS3 SFF HDDs which we’ve included in the price shown.

For NVMe SSDs, you have a number of options as in our system, there’s room to the right for an extra 8-bay backplane. You can go for a full house of NVMe SSDs with a 24-bay backplane but this doesn’t support SAS/SATA devices. It’ll cost you a PCI-E riser but you can add a 2-bay or 4-bay enclosure at the back and choose from SAS/SATA or NVMe SSD versions.

RAID sees big improvements as the new PERC11 controllers have been moved on to dedicated slots on the storage backplane. We have the standard PERC H755 front SAS model and the PERC H755N model finally brings hardware RAID to NVMe devices as this PCI-E 4 adapter has the bandwidth to make this a reality.

The BOSS (boot optimized storage solution) card gets a big makeover as well. Instead of being buried inside the server, the new S2 version presents its two M.2 slots at the rear where SATA SSDs are fitted in removable hot-swap carriers.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R750 review: Expansion and management

Expansion potential is outstanding as the revamped internal design provides sufficient room for four dual-slot PCI-E 4 risers. A range of risers are available and include a Snap I/O version that currently supports Infiniband adapters and allows them to have a x8 connection to each CPU for reduced latency.

What’s more, underneath the central riser is an OCP 3.0 mezzanine edge slot. This replaces the older proprietary LOM surface port so the R750 can use open-standard network cards from other partners as well as Dell’s own offerings.

The iDRAC9 controller doesn’t see any major improvements but none are needed - it already provides the best remote management features in town. Its web console presents a ton of information on server operations plus hardware health, with the Datacenter license adding advanced services such as streaming telemetry for predictive analytics.

We run Dell EMC’s OpenManage Enterprise (OME) server in the lab as a Hyper-V VM allowing us to monitor and configure all our PowerEdge servers from one web console. To test the Power Manager plug-in, we imported an iDRAC9 Enterprise Advanced license to the R750, added it to our monitored device group and used the OME home page to view historical graphs of group power consumption ranging from 6 hours to a year, check on thermals and see which systems were using the most power.

The plug-in will prove invaluable to data centres as it supports up to 8,000 systems and can enforce per-rack power cap and thermal event-based policies to automatically throttle servers back when they’re getting toasty. And if the situation becomes critical, the EPR (emergency power reduction) feature can push out an instant mass policy to selected groups forcing all members to drop to a low power mode or be gracefully shut down.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R750 review: Verdict

As one of the first Gen3 Xeon Scalable servers to market, the PowerEdge R750 sets a very high standard for the rest to follow. The redesigned chassis delivers improved cooling, a huge expansion potential plus plenty of great storage features, and combining these with top-notch remote management services makes this 2U rack server ideally suited to a wide range of common data centre duties.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R750 specifications (as reviewed)

Rack servers can play a number of different roles in a business – but Dell EMC’s PowerEdge R340 is versatile enough to suit almost any of them. Its short-depth 1U chassis delivers Xeon E-2200 processing power, along with flexible storage arrangements and good expansion potential.

The system we tested includes a quad-core 3.4GHz Intel Xeon E-2224 CPU. It also comes with twice as much RAM, meaning you get 32GB of ECC DDR4 to play with out of the box – but note that the maximum memory provision is limited to 64GB, as Dell EMC’s firmware doesn’t currently support the full 128GB addressable by Xeon E-2200 CPUs.

One of our favourite things about Dell EMC servers is their management framework. The embedded iDRAC controller presents a slick web portal with a detailed status overview and a whole heap of data on system and component temperatures, cooling, voltages and power usage.

It’s not limited to hardware monitoring, either: the iDRAC console can also provide system inventory information and even give you access to the RAID controller for storage configuration. Full OS remote control and virtual media services aren’t included unless you spring for an iDRAC9 Enterprise licence – but we think that’s a worthwhile upgrade, and have included it in the price shown above.

It’s possible to monitor and manage the server from a mobile device too, using the OpenManage app for Android and iOS. We installed it on our iPad and were then quickly able to view the server’s status, pull up a list of hardware and receive alert notifications on health issues. This particular server can’t be managed over Bluetooth, however, as there isn’t a space for the optional Quick Sync 2 Bluetooth module.

Still, it can accommodate plenty of storage permutations. The model we tested has four LFF hot-swap bays, but you can choose eight SFF bays instead. RAID options are flexible too, with the basic system using an embedded PERC S140 controller to provide software-managed mirrors, stripes and RAID5 arrays for SATA drives. Smart Value configurations such as this one add a PERC H330 card, which works with 12Gbits/sec SAS drives as well, though it doesn’t support any additional array types.

Another option is to choose Dell’s HBA330 card – a simple non-RAID controller that presents up to eight SAS3 channels – and use a software solution such as Microsoft’s Storage Spaces to take care of pooling and mirroring drives.

No matter which approach you go for, you don’t need to worry about running out of expansion slots. The disk controller card gets a dedicated PCIe slot on the side of the motherboard, leaving both slots in the riser card available for whatever upgrades you fancy. Dell EMC offers a range of Gigabit and 10GbE adapters to complement the server’s dual embedded ports.

If you’re looking to maximise your storage, it’s also worth considering Dell EMC’s BOSS (Boot Optimised Storage Solution) card. This adds a pair of M.2 SATA SSDs to house your operating system, allowing you to dedicate all full-sized drives to data. It’s expensive, though, costing £446 for the dual 240GB SSD version. A slower but cheaper alternative is the Internal Dual SD Module (IDSDM) card, which supports mirroring, fits in a dedicated motherboard slot and costs £100 with a pair of 16GB SD cards.

The PowerEdge R340 is a versatile little rack server with plenty to recommend it to a small business. Some optional upgrades are pricey, but Dell EMC’s remote management services are top-notch and there’s plenty of expansion space to keep up with growing needs.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R340 specifications

The Dell EMC PowerEdge brand name may have first appeared way back in the mid-90s but for the XE2420, it’s never been more appropriate. This 2U rack server is, quite simply, designed to deliver some serious computing power to the network edge.

The XE2420 targets a wide range of edge computing applications including 5G adoption, retail, analytics, transport, plant automation, automotive industry in-car testing, shopping malls, VSANs, energy production and much more. It’s designed to work in harsh environments in temperatures of between 5 and 40 degrees C and its large bezel accepts an optional dust filter.

A striking feature is the short-depth chassis, which measures only 557mm with the bezel attached, allowing it to go where normal rack servers can’t. Don’t be fooled by this shortness through; the XE2420 is capable of packing a mighty specification.

It supports dual Xeon Scalable CPUs including the Cascade Lake models, while memory can be boosted to a maximum of 1TB with RDIMMs and 1.75TB using LR-DIMMs. Storage options are plentiful as well, but a key feature is its facilities for up to five PCI-E expansion slots, with GPU cards a high priority.

Dell EMC PowerEdge XE2420 review: System design

The XE2420 employs a reverse system design with all expansion slots, drive bays and network ports accessible from the front. All system cooling is handled by a bank of six high-performance hot-plug fans arranged across the rear of the chassis.

Our system was supplied with two meaty 2kW Platinum hot-plug PSUs, which are also accessed from the front and use a reverse air-flow design. The bezel is a chunky lump of steel and along with the removable dust filter in the front, it has apertures with dust brushes on each side for cable connections.

There’s a lot going on underneath the lid and Dell EMC has packed a lot of hardware into this server. You can’t miss the two reinforced GPU expansion cages, which run the full length of the chassis and have two 16X Gen 3 PCI-E slots apiece - all supporting full-height (FH), full length (FL) cards.

The motherboard lurks underneath these cages and presents dual CPU sockets accompanied by a total of 16 DIMM slots. The system on review is well-specified; the price we’ve shown includes a tasty pair of 2.7GHz 12-core Intel Xeon Scalable Gold 6226 CPUs, partnered by 192GB of 2,933MHz DDR4 memory.

Dell EMC PowerEdge XE2420 review: Storage and expansion

Dell EMC offers three versions of the XE2420 and on test we have the 1A model, which supports two SFF drives. You can opt for SATA drives, but our system has the NVMe riser card installed and includes a pair of 3.84TB NVMe SSDs.

The 2C model supplants the leftmost PCI-E riser with a second dual-drive SFF cage, while the 3A version brings EDSFF (Enterprise & Data Center SSD Form Factor) into the storage equation. Remarkably, there’s enough room inside for an EDSFF switch backplane and full-length cage, which supports six E1.L (long) SSDs allowing storage capacity to be pushed to 92TB.

Graphics options are extensive, and the server supports two x16 300W or four x8 75W passive GPU cards. The XE2420 has an upper 150W TDP threshold for CPUs but this does cover all the Bronze, Silver and Gold 5200 Gen2 models, along with a fair few Gold 6200s.

Expansion options don’t stop here - the motherboard offers an OCP slot which, although it’s the older 2.0 variety, accepts dual-port 10GbE or 25GbE mezzanine cards. A fifth PCI-E slot sits above this as the centre slot riser has an interposer board cabled to it and its slot supports a half-width, half-length card.

We also have Dell EMC’s trusty BOSS (boot optimized storage solution) card, which is tucked neatly away in a dedicated slot underneath the central drive cage. This was fitted with dual 480GB M.2 SATA SSDs in a mirrored array allowing us to run an OS without using any front bays.

Dell EMC PowerEdge XE2420 review: Remote management

The XE2420 sports a full-strength embedded iDRAC9 remote management controller, which presents a smart web interface offering a wealth of information on system and component status, power usage and cooling efficiency. Along with full hardware inventory, it provides direct access to the server’s BIOS plus storage configuration, and the Enterprise license included in the price activates OS remote console and virtual media services.

Deployment is a cinch; we just used the remote console to map a Windows Server 2019 ISO to the XE2420 as a virtual drive. We then handed this over to the Lifecycle Controller feature for installation and selected the BOSS card as the destination.

The iDRAC9 has a sharp focus on security, with a System Lockdown mode stopping users making any configuration changes, while full supply chain security is assured by cryptographically signed firmware packages. Upgrading to the Datacenter iDRAC9 license enables telemetry streaming of over 20 hardware metrics for analytics, plus thermal and airflow management and tighter access security with automatic certificate enrolment.

Sadly, the XE2420 doesn’t support the Quick Sync 2 module, which enables mobile connections over Bluetooth for walk-up diagnostics using the OpenManage Mobile (OMM) app. All is not lost though, as we could use the OMM app to access the server over the LAN, and also plug a USB cable into the small control panel at the front and connect directly to a Windows laptop for accessing the iDRAC9 web interface using the standard RNDIS driver.

Dell EMC PowerEdge XE2420 review: Verdict

You do pay a premium for its compactness, but the PowerEdge XE2420 is perfect for enterprises that want to push some serious compute and data analytics power out to the network edge. The space-efficient short-depth chassis is surprisingly expandable, it supports a high GPU density and offers a wide range of storage options including the latest high-capacity EDSFF SSDs.

Dell EMC PowerEdge XE2420 specifications

With prices starting at just £538, the PowerEdge T140 is a tempting proposition for growing SMBs looking for their first purpose-built server. This sturdy little tower comes with support for Intel’s powerful Xeon E-2200 CPUs, flexible storage options, and room to expand with demand.

There’s a good range of core configurations on offer to suit almost any workload, too. The Basic entry-level system sports a 3.6GHz Core i3-9100 CPU and 8GB of DDR4, while the Standard model starts at £832 and offers a larger CPU choice, with all Xeon E-2100 and E-2200 models available.

Coming in at £2,033, our review system is clearly a lot more expensive, but it’s powerful enough for the most demanding of roles. We selected a 3.4GHz quad-core Xeon E-2224 CPU, and partnered it with a healthy 32GB of DDR4 RAM: for even more power, you can step up to a six-core HT-enabled Xeon E-2236 for an extra £78, and push the memory up to the supported maximum of 64GB.

Whichever spec you choose, the T140 looks stylish thanks to Dell EMC’s classic honeycomb front cover. In this instance, though, there’s nothing to see behind it, as the server doesn’t support hot-swap hard disks. Instead, storage resides in a cage behind the side panel, which will take up to four cabled LFF hard disks. Installing a quartet of 2TB SATA models was a quick procedure, thanks to the simple-swap, tool-free carriers that slide out of the internal cage. Access is easy too, as the side panel opens up in seconds via a sturdy latching lever. This doesn’t have an integrated key lock, but you can padlock it to block access to the server’s innards.

Standard RAID is provided by the embedded PERC S140 controller, which handles software-managed mirrors, stripes, and RAID5 arrays for SATA drives. For our system, we added the PERC H330 card, which adds support for hardware-managed RAID arrays, plus Nearline-SAS and standard 12Gbits/sec SAS drives.

There’s plenty of room for further expansion too, thanks to the server’s four PCIe slots. We filled one of these with Dell EMC’s BOSS (boot-optimised storage solution) card: for £379, this provides a mirrored pair of 240GB M.2 SSDs for your OS to reside on, leaving the main bays dedicated to data storage.

Internally, the T140 is very well designed, with cable clutter kept to a minimum and easy access to all the key components. Cooling is handled by an active CPU heatsink, plus a discreet 9cm chassis fan at the rear: our iPad recorded a low noise level of 38.5dB from a metre away, so the T140 won’t be a distraction in small offices.

The cherry on the cake is remote management. The PowerEdge T140 is blessed with a full-strength iDRAC9 controller and a dedicated Gigabit Ethernet port, exactly as found on much pricier servers. This presents a slick web console providing a wealth of data on all hardware components, system status, power usage, and cooling efficiency. Along with full firmware and hardware inventory functions, it provides direct access to the BIOS and storage controllers for remote configuration.

Three licensing options are offered for iDRAC9 and we selected the Enterprise level, which also activates full OS remote control and virtual media services. These are very handy for installing an operating system: after mounting a Windows Server 2019 ISO image as a virtual optical drive, we were able to use the embedded Lifecycle Controller to load the OS and all necessary drivers in 30 minutes flat.

The PowerEdge T140 is an ideal candidate for smaller offices that want an affordable on-site server with plenty of room to expand. It packs a powerful hardware package into a space-saving chassis, can be easily customised to suit all budgets, and includes the best remote management features around.

Dell EMC PowerEdge T140 specifications

Dell Technologies has kicked off its annual conference with the announcement of Project Apex, its plan to consolidate its ‘as a service’ offerings.

Described by Sam Grocott, senior vice president of Dell Technologies Business Unit marketing, as a “radically simplified as a service and cloud experience”, the new project acknowledges that the future of enterprise IT is “really going to be a hybrid, multi-cloud world”.

Speaking to journalists ahead of the company’s annual Dell Technologies World conference – which, like most conferences this year is being held as a ‘virtual experience’ – Grocott explained that Apex is a strategy, rather than a product, and is “how [Dell Technologies] is going to take as a service – which is already very successful – and cloud and [make it more unified]”.

The foundation of Apex is Dell Technologies Cloud Console, which acts as both a provisioning and management platform for cloud and as a service products. The company claims that customers can deploy workloads, manage multi-cloud resources and keep an eye on costs “with a few clicks”.

Sitting atop this is Dell Technologies Storage as-a-Service, an on-premises offering that features elastic block and file storage, which is delivered on an OpEx model and can be dialled up or down as needed via Cloud Console.

Also announced were Dell Technologies Cloud Platform instance-based offerings, which allows customers to start using hybrid cloud from $47 per instance per month. This can also be provisioned and managed from within Cloud Console, based on predefined configurations.

Cloud Console is available in the US as a public preview now, with general availability coming around the world in the first half of 2021. Storage-as-a-Service will also be available from the first half of 2021.

Dell is considering spinning off its 81% stake in VMware worth almost $50 billion (approximately £40 billion) with a view to creating more value for money for shareholders.

The company is engaging in an exploration of a potential spinoff of its equity ownership in software giant VMware, with any potential deal not occurring before September next year. Dell confirmed the news after submitting a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The potential move, which is in its very early stages and may not even arise at all, has been announced 17 years after EMC acquired the company in a $625 million (approximately £500 million). Dell, in turn, gained the asset after merging with storage firm EMC in 2016.

"The strategic relationship between Dell Technologies and VMware has never been stronger," said Dell Technologies’ CEO Michael Dell. "For more than 20 years, we've innovated for our customers and created substantial growth and value for both companies and our teams.

“Regardless of the options we are exploring to create additional value, we are accelerating our strategy - which remains unchanged. We are focused on winning in the consolidating markets where we operate and innovating across the Dell Technologies portfolio to create integrated solutions that turn data into insights and action."

There have long been rumblings of a potential move in the other direction, with Dell, in May 2018, considering a full merger (also known as a 'reverse spinoff') with VMware after making a filing with the SEC.

This is before Dell once again become a publicly trading company in December of that year. The company originally went public in 1988 before taking the company private in 2013.

Spinning off VMWare would mean the company would become independent either through the sale or distribution of new shares, and it’s expected to be worth more than if it were to remain part of the larger Dell brand.

The company would retain its own management structure and be established as an independent company, although may continue to rely on financial and technological support from Dell.

The nature of the spinoff has not yet been determined, and Dell is considering a range of strategic options concerning its ownership interest in VMware, including maintaining its current ownership in the firm.

As part of the exploration process, the company expects to formalise mutually beneficial commercial arrangements similar to those in place now, including go-to-market services, R&D, and IP agreements between VMware and Dell. These should apply should VMware become an independent entity.

Dell also hopes to maintain VMware’s credit rating and improve Dell’s credit rating at the time of, or shortly before, a potential spin-off, and enhance the timescale by which the company expects to attain an ‘investment grade’ level.

AMD's EPYC 7002 CPUs offer a server core density that Intel can only dream of and Dell EMC's PowerEdge C6525 takes full advantage of this. Inside its 2U rack enclosure, there's room for up to four dual-socket server nodes which support the entire EPYC 7002 stack - including the new 7Fx2 high-frequency models - allowing it to deliver an unbelievable maximum density of 512 physical and 1,024 logical cores.

With this much power on tap, enterprises can easily consolidate multiple servers into one system and conceivably build a complete data centre out of a single rack. Naturally, high-performance computing (HPC) and hyperscale workloads are target applications but cost-conscious businesses can also deploy the nodes in single-CPU configurations and still achieve high core densities plus additional savings on lower data centre cooling demands.

Storage choices look good too, since the chassis is available with a wide range of LFF and SFF SAS3/SATA drives plus NVMe SSDs. You can dispense with the backplane completely, as the nodes have a number of integral storage choices as well.

Dell EMC PowerEdge C6525 review: Chassis

The C6400 chassis is the same model as used by Dell's PowerEdge C6420 Xeon Scalable nodes, where they slot in at the rear and function as completely independent units. The chassis supports two hot-plug PSUs and along with the dual 2,400W Platinum models in our review system, Dell also offers 2,000W and 1,600W versions.

Power is distributed to the nodes via a mid-plane management board while a separate drive expander backplane provisions allotted storage to each node. Both power and storage are neatly amalgamated into one plug for each node, sliding easily into the rear of the chassis and employing a small edge connector to receive all services.

The chassis supports up to 12 LFF or 24 SFF hot-swap bays where each node gets an equal share of drives. The optional NVMe backplane presents each node with two NVMe SSDs and four SFF SAS3/SATA hard disks or SSDs.

All air cooling is handled by four cold-swap, dual-rotor fans which, unsurprisingly, run at very high speeds. If noise is an issue, and also if you want to use the 280W TDP EPYC CPUs, Dell offers liquid-cooled sleds made by CoolIT Systems that comprise CPU cold plates, stainless steel manifolds, non-drip quick disconnects and various heat exchange modules.

Dell EMC PowerEdge C6525 review: Node features

The C6525 nodes pack a remarkable specification into a relatively small space. The two EPYC CPU sockets are arranged in line down the centre of the motherboard with each flanked by eight DIMM slots.

Our review system was equipped with two C6525 nodes each sporting dual 64-core 2.0GHz EPYC 7702 CPUs. These were teamed up with sixteen 64GB 3,200MHz DDR4 RDIMM modules for the maximum 1TB capacity – use 128GB LRDIMMs and you can go up to 2TB per node.

The nodes have a single Gigabit port which doubles up as a link to the iDRAC9 management controller and as a standard NIC. An OCP 3.0 mezzanine card edge slot adds more network options as along with the dual 10GbE SFP+ module in our nodes, Dell offers plenty of Gigabit, 10GbE, 25GbE and 100GbE alternatives. The slot also accepts open-standard OCP 3.0 network cards from other partners as well as Dell's own offerings.

The nodes have embedded S150 SATA RAID controllers so if you want SAS3 storage, you'll need to add a Dell PERC adapter in each node. That's no problem as they have two half-height PCI-E 4 risers ready and waiting.

We've also included Dell's BOSS (boot optimized storage solution) PCI-E card which snuggles into a dedicated slot at the rear of the node. It provides mirrored M.2 SSD storage for running an OS and is required if you want the diskless chassis.

Dell EMC PowerEdge C6525 review: Node management

The nodes are endowed with the full iDRAC9 embedded controller so server management doesn't get any better. Its slick web console provides everything you need to know about node operations, hardware and health although it doesn't provide the System page CPU performance tab, which is still unable to support AMD's architecture.

The iDRAC9 comes preloaded with a choice of performance BIOS profiles which can be selected from the web console. Our nodes also had an Enterprise X5 license applied to enable remote console and virtual media services, while streaming telemetry for predictive analytics comes courtesy of a Datacenter X5 license.

We run Dell's OpenManage Enterprise (OME) 3.4 software in the lab as a Hyper-V VM and added both our C6525 nodes as managed servers using their iDRAC9 addresses. The OME web console provides plenty of details on system status along with options to control server power, load a remote control console and automate routine maintenance tasks.

The chassis has two node power buttons on each rack ear - which means there's no room for Dell's Quick Sync 2 Bluetooth module. Even so, we were still able to manually add the iDRAC9 address of each node to the OpenManage Mobile (OMM) iOS app on our iPad and use it to monitor their status, view all server information, alerts plus health readouts and launch a remote virtual console.

Dell EMC PowerEdge C6525 review: Verdict

Dell's close collaboration with AMD is producing some remarkable server solutions that competing blue chips can't even come close to matching. When we reviewed Dell's PowerEdge R7525 2U rack server, we were impressed with its EPYC core density and the C6525 takes this into the stratosphere.

Cramming 512 EPYC cores into 2U of rack space is no mean feat and Dell achieves this with a smartly designed and highly flexible solution. Along with the surprisingly expandable nodes, it offers plenty of storage choices, while server management tools are beyond reproach - making it perfect for serious server consolidation projects, HPC applications and hyperscale workloads.

Dell EMC PowerEdge C6525 specifications

Dell Technologies announced financial results for its fiscal first quarter of 2021 on Thursday.

The company ended Q1 2021 with $13.2 billion in cash and investments and $27.6 billion in deferred revenue. In all, the company generated $21.9 billion in revenue in Q1, achieving $702 million in operating income.

In its announcement, Dell Technologies also shared that recurring revenues for the business reached approximately $6 billion, a 16% year-over-year increase.

In its announcement, the company gave an inside look at fiscal first-quarter revenues for its Client Solutions Group. In comparison to last year’s results, revenues in Q1 climbed 2% to $11.1 billion.

Dell attributed the revenue growth to two things: laptops sold to businesses and the sale of mobile workstation computers. In the end, Dell Technologies outperformed its competition in this arena, becoming “the only top-five vendor gaining year-over-year worldwide share in total and commercial client units.”

Dell’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, on the other hand, has experienced an 8% decrease from 2020 with $7.6 billion in Q1 revenue. Storage revenue was down 5% tool, as Q1 revenues fell to $3.8 billion.

Meanwhile, servers and networking revenue fell 10% with Q1 revenues of $3.8 billion. Dell attributed the downturn to “customers directing more spend towards remote work and business continuity solutions.”

Tom Sweet, CFO at Dell Technologies shared in the announcement of the company’s Q1 results, "Since February, almost everything in the world has changed. What remains unchanged is our ability to deliver for customers and run the business in a disciplined way for the long-term – with an emphasis on growth, share gain, and a strong capital structure."

Dell is racing ahead with its AMD EPYC server program and leaving the likes of HPE languishing in the doldrums. It now offers five PowerEdge rack models with Gen2 EPYC CPUs, and the latest R7525 on review delivers a specification that defies belief.

It supports most of AMD’s EPYC 7002 series and the system on review sports a pair of 64-core 2.0GHz EPYC 7002 CPUs - that’s a staggering 128 physical and 256 logical cores in only 2U of rack space. These AMD bad boys all offer 8 memory channels, support 3,200MHz RDIMM and 2,666MHz LRDIMM DDR4 memory and present 128 PCI-E 4.0 lanes.

The R7525 isn’t a rehash of previous generation PowerEdge servers either, and presents a completely redesigned chassis and internals. The new motherboard offers greater expansion potential, is future-proofed for the next EPYC Gen3 series and the chassis has a bigger emphasis on air cooling, so it can continue to use six standard fans even for AMD’s 280W 7H12 CPUs.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R7525 review: Design for life

Cracking the lid reveals a superbly designed interior and the first thing you’ll notice is the new T-shaped motherboard. This has allowed Dell to split the PSUs across the back of the chassis - making it more amenable to rack PDUs - and also lets the server use 2.4kW AC/HVDC modules to service the higher-power EPYCs, more expansion slots and up to 6 GPU cards.

The layout creates a more balanced air flow so there are no hot spots on one side of the server. Dell has also been able to improve PCI-E 4.0 signal integrity by rerouting some of the motherboard circuitry.

Lift off the PCI-E risers and you’ll find an OCP 3.0 mezzanine card edge slot underneath. This replaces the older proprietary LOM surface port so the R7525 can use open-standard OCP 3.0 network cards from other partners as well as Dell’s own offerings.

Storage sees a radical reshaping as Dell’s PERC RAID controllers have been moved off the motherboard and on to a dedicated slot on the storage backplane. This significantly reduces cable clutter and the new PERC H745 adapter in our system supports SAS3/SATA storage devices and all the usual enterprise RAID array suspects.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R7525 review: Storage evolution

The R7525 offers plenty of storage options, so choose your backplane carefully to save upgrading later on. Base systems start with an 8-drive LFF hot-swap backplane or you can dispense with the optical drive panel and go for a full 12-drive LFF version.

For SFF storage, you can choose from 8, 16 or 24 bays, with the hot-swap backplane incorporating a SAS expander so the RAID card can manage them all. If you’re happy to lose a PCI-Express riser, you can add an extra dual-drive SFF bay at the back.

Our review system is even more talented; it came with 16 x SSF and 8 x NVMe drive backplanes and the price we’ve shown includes six 900GB 15K SAS3 HDDs and a 375GB Intel P4800X Optane NVMe. The NVMe backplane is cabled directly to front-mounted ports on the motherboard and Dell is already qualifying PCI-E 4.0 NVMe devices – the server and backplane are ready now and will just need firmware upgrades to support them.

Last up is a full 24-bay NVMe model making the R7525 a great choice for delivering all-Flash software-defined storage (SDS). We’ve also included Dell’s BOSS (boot optimized storage solution) PCI-E card, which provides mirrored M.2 SSD storage so we could run an OS without using any front bays.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R7525 review: Expansion and power

The server’s expansion potential is impressive, with room for four dual-slot risers at the rear – another benefit of the repositioned PSUs. They’re all the PCI-E 4.0 variety and you can choose from a range of riser configurations depending on the number of x8 and x16 slots you want.

The OCP port sits underneath the two central stacked risers and our system included a Broadcom quad-port Gigabit card, with Dell also offering dual and quad-port fibre and copper 10GbE plus dual-port 10/25GbE cards. The OCP slot is flanked on one side by a standard dual Gigabit LOM card and Dell’s iDRAC9 controller on the other.

The server’s 32 DIMM slots allow the R7525 to support 2TB of 3,200MHz RDIMM and 4TB of 2,666MHz LRDIMM memory. With Windows Server 2019 loaded, we did spot the Task Manager reporting four CPU sockets but this is a known Microsoft bug that doesn’t affect performance.

As we had 200W TDP CPUs, this requires the dual 2.4kW PSUs and one drawback on these core-heavy beasts is their appetite for power. We measured the system drawing 320W with Windows Server 2019 in idle and peaking at 537W with all 128 cores under maximum load.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R7525 review: Server management

Dell’s iDRAC9 controller sets the standard for remote management, with its web console offering a wealth of information on all hardware components as well as direct access to BIOS and storage configurations. Our Enterprise X5 license brings remote console and virtual media services into play while the Datacenter X5 license enables advanced features such as streaming telemetry for predictive analytics.

You can remotely manage all your Dell systems and services from the OpenManage Enterprise (OME) software, which we run in the lab as a Hyper-V VM. Along with management and monitoring of server and storage systems, you can use it to ensure firmware compliance and keep an eye on Hyper-V and VMware hosts.

We highly recommend Dell’s Quick Sync 2 module, as it provides walk-up access directly over Bluetooth. We run the OpenManage Mobile (OMM) iOS app on our iPad and used it to monitor the R7525 and receive alert notifications on health issues.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R7525 review: Verdict

The PowerEdge R7525 is a class-leading 2U rack server that delivers a remarkable EPYC core density and an abundance of storage features. It’s perfect for enterprises looking to maximise their rack potential and the innovative new internal system design pays dividends in features, expansion and cooling.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R7525 specifications (As reviewed)

Dell EMC has taken the wraps off PowerStore, a new line of mid-range storage arrays that bring Dell and EMC technologies together in a single appliance, on what would have been the first day of parent company Dell Technologies’ annual conference.

Speaking to journalists ahead of the launch, Travis Vigil, SVP of product management at Dell EMC, said it was the first new product introduced since the 2016 merger between Dell and EMC that used expertise from across both sides of the storage and server business, as well as from other arms – notably VMware.

Caitlin Gordon, VP of marketing at Dell EMC Storage, added that the company has been working on this project for “a number of years”

Explaining the development of PowerStore, Gordon pointed to the fact that data has never been more valuable for businesses than it is today, but noted that it’s also incredibly diverse and difficult to manage. At the same time, organisations are also under pressure to carry out digital transformation, which IT is expected to support.

“What we found in our conversations with customers over the last number of years is they felt like their infrastructure investments require them to prioritise either the needs of their data, or the needs of their operating model in their operations,” she said.

Upon realising there was nothing in the Dell Technologies portfolio – nor, the company claims, anything in the market more generally – that met that dual need in a single system, the decision was taken to build a new product “from the ground up”.

Scalable, programmable, autonomous

PowerStore is an Active-Active HA dual node appliance, with end-to-end NVMe and the ability to support either NVMe-based flash or dual-ported Optane storage class memory (SCM) drives from Intel. This, Dell claims, makes it 7x faster with 3x lower latency than its previous lead mid-range all-flash product.

The company also says that PowerStore can support any workload, traditional or modern, including containers, files, and virtualised or physical apps and databases. It also offers the ability to scale up and scale out up to 2.8 petabytes effective and 11.3 petabytes effective per cluster respectively, as well as having always-on inline deduplication.

It also has built-in machine learning to help optimise system performance, cloudIQ storage monitoring software and is programmable, allowing administrators to treat the infrastructure “as code”.

PowerStore is available immediately.

Targeting diverse enterprise workloads such as virtualisation, HCI, big databases and VDI, Dell’s PowerEdge R6515 delivers a monumental core density in the slimmest of rack server packages. Powered by AMD’s Gen2 EPYC 7002 CPUs, our review system was supplied with a 32-core EPYC 7502P but the server is also available with a big choice of other models including four of AMD’s mighty 64-core chips.

The new EPYCs allow the R6515 to deliver a 100% increase in core density over the first generation R6415. The top memory capacity of 2TB and 8 integral channels remain the same, but the EPYC 7002 CPUs boost memory speed from 2,666MHz to 3,200MHz and deliver support for PCI-E 4.0.

The bottom line is the R6515 delivers the processing power and I/O capacity of a 2P server but in a more compact and rack-friendly 1P package. This isn’t to the detriment of other features though, as its nifty internal design allows the server to offer impressive storage credentials and expansion potential.

Dell PowerEdge R6515 review: Design and build quality

Lifting the lid reveals a busy but well-designed interior affording easy access for maintenance maneuvers. The layout is pretty much the same as the R6415 with the EPYC CPU sitting centrally on the motherboard, mounted by a solid passive heatsink and flanked on each side by 8 DIMM slots.

The 7502P CPU in our system has a base speed of 2.5GHz and a top boost frequency of 3.35GHz. It delivers 32 physical and 64 logical cores and sports a meaty 128MB L3 cache.

The EPYC’s on-chip memory controllers mean you don’t need a second CPU to realise the top 2TB capacity - but there is one caveat. RDIMMs support 3,200MHz memory speeds but are only available in sizes up to 64GB whereas LR-DIMMs go up to 128GB sizes but drop speed to 2,666MHz.

Dell PowerEdge R6515 review: Storage permutations

The R6515 offers plenty of storage options with a choice of three backplanes. Base systems have a 4 LFF hot-swap backplane or you can opt for an 8 SFF version if you want to keep the optical drive.

Dell dispensed with the optical drive for our review system, which was supplied with the full 10 SFF bay backplane. A notable feature is it has eight universal bays that support SATA, SAS3 and NVMe devices and two for NVMe SSDs only.

No PCI-E adapter cards are required for NVMe support as the backplane ports are cabled directly to the PCI-E sockets at the front of the motherboard. If you want to mix SATA/SAS3 and NVMe devices, you’ll need to specify a controller card as the motherboard doesn’t have embedded RAID.

RAID choices start with the entry-level PERC H330 Mini card which snaps into the dedicated slot at the rear of the motherboard and supports SATA/SAS3 drives plus stripes, mirrors and RAID5 arrays. Our system sports the top-dog PERC H740P Mini card, which adds RAID6 to the mix and includes 8GB of NVRAM cache plus a battery backup unit.

Dell PowerEdge R6515 review: Power and expansion

Power choices are simplified as the R6515 is only available with dual 550W hot-plug PSUs. Cooling is handled by six fans of the cold-swap variety, arranged behind the drive backplane.

The R6515 can present two PCI-E expansion slots using optional riser cards. These convert the slot nearest the PSU bay to a PCI-E 3.0 version while the one next door employs a larger motherboard connector to provide PCI-E 4.0 services.

The R6515 comes with dual embedded Gigabit ports and you don’t need to lose an expansion slot to expand, as underneath the PCI-E 4.0 riser is a LOM (LAN on motherboard) port. Dell offers a good range of LOM mezzanine cards, and you can choose from dual Gigabit, 10GbE copper or fibre and 25GbE.

Other storage features of note are Dell’s IDSDM (internal dual SD module) which fits into a dedicated slot on the motherboard and provides redundant storage for running a hypervisor. We’ve also included the BOSS (boot optimized storage solution) M.2 SSD card which uses a PCI-E slot and provides mirrored storage using dual M.2 SSDs so you can run an OS without using any front drive bays.

Dell PowerEdge R6515 review: Server management

Remote server management is a class act; the embedded iDRAC9 controller presents a smart web interface offering a vast amount of information on system and component status, power usage and cooling efficiency. Along with full hardware inventory, it provides direct access to BIOS as well as storage configuration, and the Enterprise X5 license activates a remote console and virtual media services.

The new Datacenter X5 license adds telemetry streaming of over 20 hardware metrics for analytics plus thermal and airflow management and tighter access security with automatic certificate enrolment. The only feature you won’t find for any of Dell’s EPYC servers is the System page performance tab, which is still unable to support AMD’s architecture.

The Quick Sync 2 module is a must-have feature for data centre technicians. Using the OpenManage Mobile (OMM) iOS app on our iPad, we connected to it over Bluetooth by scanning the QR code on the pull-out system label and could then view all server information, alerts and health status.

The OpenManage Enterprise (OME) software provides general systems management of all Dell equipment. We run it in the lab as a Hyper-V VM and after discovering the server’s iDRAC9, we were able to manage and monitor it, directly access the controller’s web console and run remote control sessions. We also used the new OME extension for the Windows Admin Center to view health information and hardware inventory.

Dell PowerEdge R6515 review: Verdict

The PowerEdge R6515 is perfect for enterprises that want the highest core density in the smallest rack footprint. It may only be 1U high but the R6515 delivers great expansion potential, a wide range of storage options plus the best remote management tools - and all at a temptingly low price.

Dell PowerEdge R6515 specifications

It’s shaping up to be a year of big moves in the IT industry. While Xerox and HP circle each other and companies like Google and FireEye snap up smaller businesses, Dell Technologies has announced this week that it will be selling off RSA Security to a consortium of buyers led by private equity firm Symphony Technology Group.

The security firm has a long and storied history, founded by the developers of the RSA public key cryptographic algorithm which still underpins a good deal of cybersecurity today. It joined the EMC Federation in 2006, but found itself under the benevolent leadership of Michael Dell back in 2015 after the mammoth merger that created both Dell EMC and the wider Dell Technologies family.

As part of that merger, Dell absorbed not just EMC, but also RSA, SecureWorks, VMware, Pivotal and Virtustream, creating a somewhat mis-matched portfolio. Dell and EMC make for obvious bedfellows thanks to their shared focus on infrastructure hardware, and VMware offers a range of complementary capabilities. The others, however, felt somewhat out of place, offering cloud and software services that didn’t really fit with Dell’s infrastructure-heavy offering.

Now, however, the company looks a lot more streamlined. RSA was by far the biggest and oddest outlier in Dell’s portfolio, and now that it’s gone, a new shape is starting to reveal itself. VMware has quickly become the golden child of Dell’s stable, with multiple co-branded initiatives and product synergies, and the portfolio has been reshuffled to reflect this. Pivotal is now owned by VMware, and it’s not unreasonable to expect that Virtustream will go the same way before too long – the latter company is geared towards supporting cloud migration, which meshes exceedingly well with VMware’s multi-cloud focus.

This just leaves SecureWorks. Another odd one out within the Dell Technologies family, the managed security services and threat detection provider doesn’t really have an obvious place beside the rest of Dell’s subdivisions – particularly given that VMware’s latest acquisition, Carbon Black, fills what few strategic roles it could reasonably be expected to play. If I was a betting man, I’d be inclined to put money on it also being sold off before the year’s out.

What, then, does that leave us with? Well, in short, it leaves us with a streamlined, hyper-focused hybrid cloud powerhouse. Dell EMC’s class-leading infrastructure hardware, coupled with VMware’s dominance of the software frameworks that run on it, makes for a formidable combination. Without the baggage of tangentially-related sub-brands to slow it down, Dell Technologies is free to divert its full focus (discounting its client computing business) on the back-end infrastructure markets in which it has the strongest position, rather than spreading itself thin trying to be all things to all customers.

Fundamentally, this is a clear statement of intent from Dell, and maps out a trajectory that is more focused, more thoughtful and more ruthlessly efficient than we’ve yet seen from the company. If I were a rival vendor, I’d be feeling somewhat worried right about now.

There’s something indefinably exciting about getting a new piece of hardware to play with; whether it’s a smartphone or a server, there’s a certain joy in unpacking a new device and getting to grips with its capabilities, seeing how far you can push its limits.

As 2019 draws to a close, we’re taking a look back over the best products of the year. It’s been a strong year in most product categories, with new iterations of some of our favourite ranges. Although this year hasn’t seen the release of any particularly revolutionary products - and we’re discounting foldable phones, as they haven’t been widely released as yet - there have been some strong showings across the board.

Here, then, are our hand-picked awards for the top products of 2019.

Best laptop

WINNER: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme

Lenovo’s monster ThinkPad X1 Extreme is a masterclass in how to create a £2,000-plus laptop that still feels like good value. This sleek machine packs an outstanding touchscreen display, powerful components and the ThinkPad’s reliably excellent keyboard into an attractive and relatively portable chassis, blending serious horsepower with boardroom looks.

As if that wasn’t enough, the X1 Extreme also includes a number of business-friendly features, including security and privacy protections and even eye-tracking features to help boost productivity. It may be expensive, but if you need a do-it-all laptop, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme is tough to beat.

Read our full Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme review.

HIGHLY COMMENDED: HP EliteBook x360 830 G6

While not quite as outstanding as the ThinkPad X1, the HP EliteBook x360 830 G6 is nevertheless an excellent all-rounder that offers all the functionality and polish an enterprise needs. While technically a convertible, it’s as a laptop that the x360 really excels and, despite a few drawbacks, it’s one of the smartest devices we’ve seen this year.

Read our full HP EliteBook x360 830 G6 review.

Best tablet

WINNER: Apple iPad mini 5

Apple has so thoroughly dominated the tablet computing space that for many people, ‘iPad’ is synonymous with the category as a whole, and the iPad mini is one of the most impressive of the lot. The latest edition is the first update to the range in almost four years, but it’s retained all the qualities that made us love the mini in the first place.

It’s more powerful than the MacBook Air, and the arrival of iPadOS’ productivity-boosting features has made it a genuine option for business users. On top of that, it’s also got support for the Apple Pencil - and all of this goodness is packed into a device that can still conceivably fit into a pocket.

Read our full Apple iPad mini 5 review.

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Samsung Galaxy Tab S6

Samsung is one of the few manufacturers still flying the flag for premium tablets, most of the other rivals having since ceded the fight to the iPad. It’s gratifying, then, that the Galaxy Tab S6 is an exemplary Android tablet, including a bundled stylus, great battery life and an impressive desktop-style UI in the form of Samsung DeX.

Read our full Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 review.

Best 2-in-1

WINNER: Microsoft Surface Pro 7

We have our qualms with Microsoft’s latest Surface Pro - the Core i5 model’s performance leaves something to be desired, and the battery life is less than we were hoping for - but despite these drawbacks, the Surface Pro 7 is still the zenith of the 2-in-1 form factor. It’s portable, versatile, and it’s still more than capable of handling everything up to proper media rendering tasks.

The Surface Pro’s design is near-perfect, and it truly comes into its own with the addition of USB-C, allowing you to flit seamlessly from a desk-based monitor, mouse and keyboard setup to on-the-go notetaking with the Surface Pen. Combine that with the smart improvements Microsoft has been making to Windows 10 and you’re got the ideal multi-purpose machine.

Read our full Microsoft Surface Pro 7 review.

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1

The Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 is aimed squarely at business users, but that doesn’t mean it has to be clunky or unattractive. On the contrary, it’s one of the more appealing convertibles we’ve tested this year - albeit in a professional, businesslike sort of way. Aside from the nice design and the smooth hinge action, it’s also a really well-rounded machine, making it perfect for mass deployments.

Read our full Dell Latitude 7400 2-in-1 review.

Best smartphone

WINNER: Samsung Galaxy Note 10+

The Galaxy S10 may be Samsung’s more mainstream device, but don’t be fooled - the ‘prosumer’ Note 10+ is where the real action’s at. With a screen measuring almost 7in and a weight of just under 200g, it’s a bit of a behemoth, but that size is concealing some of the most powerful components Samsung has ever put into a smartphone.

As with the Tab S6, DeX is a standout feature that really elevates the Note 10+, and for the truly hyper-productive, the S-Pen is still the pinnacle of mobile note-taking. Aside from this barrage of productivity-friendly features, the Note 10+ also has one of the best cameras available on a top-end flagship device.

Read our full Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ review.

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Google Pixel 3a

The Pixel 3a is the poster-child for doing more with less. Despite on paper being a less-sophisticated device than the Pixel 3, it takes all of the things we love about Google’s handsets and - thanks to its lower-powered processor - fixes its biggest issue by improving the battery life. In fact, for our money, it’s still a better bet than its successor, the Pixel 4.

Read our full Google Pixel 3a review.

Best 1U server

WINNER: Dell EMC PowerEdge R340

Dell EMC’s PowerEdge R340 might be among the most affordable of its servers, but don’t mistake it for a budget model; this pint-sized beauty is highly scalable, thanks to its support for up to eight SFF hot-swap bays, 12Gb/sec SAS speeds and a meaty quad-core Xeon E-2134.

The real attraction here, however, is Dell’s superlative iDRAC9 remote management software, which offers an HTML5-based web console for monitoring and administrating your server. The upgraded Enterprise edition allows full OS control and virtual media services, making admin tasks a breeze.

Read our full Dell EMC PowerEdge R340 review.

HIGHLY COMMENDED: HPE ProLiant DL20 Gen10

Big things come in small packages, so the saying goes, and rack servers don’t get much smaller than the 1U HPE ProLiant DL20 Gen10, which is just 41cm deep. Despite its small proportions, it still offers a wealth of storage options and plenty of power, making it an excellent choice for space-conscious organisations - although it’s not quite as scalable as the R340.

Read our full HPE ProLiant DL20 Gen10 review.

Best tower server

WINNER: Fujitsu Server Primergy TX1320 M4

Like HPE’s DL20, the Fujitsu TX1320 M4 is a dinky little machine standing just over 40cm tall, but it’s managed to cram a lot of functionality into its slim frame. Not an inch of space is wasted, and there’s a surprisingly fulsome selection of configurations to choose from, including ten Xeon E-2100 CPUs and up to eight hotplug SFF drive bays.

It’s highly configurable and has great expansion potential, which makes it a great fit for businesses that want a server that can grow along with their needs. It even includes Fujitsu’s free ServerView Suite management tool - although SMBs may be better off sticking to the simpler System Monitor utility instead.

Read our full Fujitsu Server Primergy TX1320 M4 review.

HIGHLY COMMENDED: HPE ProLiant ML30 Gen10

A bit of a beast in comparison to the TX1320, this squat, black monolith is nonetheless a capable alternative for businesses with modest infrastructure needs that don’t want to splash out on a full server cabinet. Like the Fujitsu, it features a Xeon E-2100 and a range of storage options, in addition to a range of storage options - although the fact that storage isn’t included as standard lessens its appeal a little.

Read our full HPE ProLiant ML30 Gen10 review.

Best storage array

WINNER: Lenovo ThinkSystem DE4000F

This appliance is the result of a partnership between Lenovo and NetApp, and it marks the company’s first serious foray into the enterprise storage market. As an entry-level all-Flash array with an affordable price, it’s the kind of product that should give industry mainstays like HPE and Dell EMC pause for thought.

Overall performance is excellent, with FC SAN speeds a particular highlight, and there’s an embarrassment of port options for the host interface. Showcasing the best aspects of both Lenovo and NetApp, this appliance is perfect for mid-level enterprises.

Read our full Lenovo ThinkSystem DE4000F review.

HIGHLY COMMENDED: StorageCraft OneXafe 4417

StorageCraft has built the OneXafe 4417 primarily with data protection and resiliency in mind, and it’s a perfect match for these kinds of tasks thanks to a heap of clever features. Expanding the size of your estate is simple too, with remarkably quick and easy deployment. It’s the ideal one-stop-shop for backup and disaster recovery.

Read our full StorageCraft OneXafe 4417 review.

Best NAS drive

WINNER: Synology SA3400

Marking the first of Synology’s new ‘SA’ appliances, the SA3400 is a firmly enterprise-class NAS unit that introduces both SAS3 and SATA storage. That’s in combination with a powerful eight-core Xeon-D processor and a maximum memory capacity of 128GB, which offers a pleasing amount of expandability.

It’s good value based on the price tag, but where this appliance really excels is in its performance, with blazing 10GbE speeds of more than 9.3Gbits/sec. Combine that with Synology’s well-rounded library of apps and you have an outstanding NAS that suits a range of uses.

Read our full Synology SA3400 review.

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Qnap TS-983XU-E2124-8G

This 1U NAS product may not look as imposing as some of its rivals, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in versatility. It’s well-suited to running private clouds and containers, and its smart internal design makes it easy to mix and match your drives. Its biggest flaw is that it’s not quite as affordable as we may have liked.

Read our full Qnap TS-983XU-E2124-8G review.

Best printer

WINNER: Xerox VersaLink C500DN

The main strength of Xerox’s VersaLink C500DN lies in its ConnectKey app platform, which lets users access a range of print-related apps, services and functions from its 5in colour touchscreen. Not only does that include a wide range of mobile and cloud printing tools, but it also includes things like automatic translation services - although this is only an option on models with a built-in scanner.

Even without the smart app gallery though, the C500DN is still an outstanding printer thanks to its lightning-fast speeds and fantastic output quality, combined with strong security measures to prevent misuse. Ideal for medium to large enterprises, this machine is a true workhorse.

Read our full Xerox VersaLink C500DN review.

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Kyocera Ecosys P6235cdn

The low price of the Kyocera Ecosys P6235cdn’s consumables, combined with high-capacity bundled cartridges, make this printer fabulously cheap to run. Not only that, but quality and speeds are both great. If you want wireless printing, however, you’ll need to invest £250 in an adapter card, which is a little steep for our tastes.

Read our full Kyocera Ecosys P6235cdn review.

Dell EMC's foray into the world of Xeon E servers has resulted in a choice of two 1U rack mount models. The entry-level PowerEdge R240 targets small businesses looking for their first server whereas the R340 on review focuses on those that want a scalable solution with more storage options and redundancy.

The budget-priced R240 is only available with 4 LFF drive bays but the R340 goes further, and can be ordered with 4 LFF or 8 SFF hot-swap bays. We have the four bay model which was supplied with two 1TB SATA LFF drives.

RAID options start with the embedded PERC S140 controller which supports SATA drives. Our system puts 12Gb/sec SAS on the table as the price includes a PERC H330 PCI-E RAID card which manages stripes, mirrors and RAID5 arrays.

Dell EMC's BOSS (boot optimized storage solution) PCI-E card does away with the need to put the OS on a hard disk, supporting dual mirrored M.2 SATA SSDs with the 240GB version costing 305. The R340 also supports an internal dual SD module (IDSDM) which has its own dedicated motherboard slot and is designed to run embedded hypervisors.

Power comes into the redundancy equation as the 350W hot-plug PSU we have can be partnered with a second. A spare bay is ready and waiting at the rear and you can specify high-power 550W Platinum PSUs if required.

There's plenty of power on tap, with the fast 3.5GHz 4-core Xeon E-2134 CPU teamed up with 32GB of DDR4 supplied on two 16GB sticks. Maximum memory is 64GB but Dell EMC has yet to indicate when it will offer a BIOS update that allows this to be pushed to 128GB.

The PERC H330 card is installed in a dedicated PCI-E slot on the motherboard leaving both slots in the riser card above free for upgrades. The network is served by two embedded Gigabit ports and if you feel the need for more networking speed, Dell EMC offers a wide range of 10-Gigabit cards.

CPU and memory cooling is handled by three cold-swap fans with a fourth in front of the expansion slots. The R340 is a quiet customer as the SPLnFFT app on our iPad recorded sound levels of only 44.2dB from a metre in front.

If you want classy remote management features then look no further: Dell EMC's iDRAC9 is simply the best. Its HTML5 web interface delivers a wealth of information on server operations with the Dashboard screen providing a quick view on system and storage health.

The price we've shown includes the iDRAC9 Enterprise upgrade which enables full OS remote control and virtual media services. We used the latter to map a remote Windows Server 2019 ISO to the server and called up the embedded LifeCycle Controller tool to help us install it in 30 minutes.

We use Dell EMC's OMM (OpenManage Mobile) on our iPad but the R340 doesn't support the Quick Sync 2 Bluetooth module for walk-up access. No problem though, as we could remotely monitor the server by entering the iDRAC9 IP address into OMM.

Dell EMC's OpenManage Enterprise 3.1 is also run in our lab as a Hyper-V VM and after discovering the R340, it presented plenty of details on general operations. It also provides fault alerting services, direct access to the server's virtual console, inventory and remote power controls.

The PowerEdge R340 offers a great specification at a good price. It has the power and expansion potential to handle demanding business apps and is the only choice if you want the best remote management features on the planet.

Never let it be said that I can't admit when I'm wrong: before I flew out to Las Vegas for this year's Dell Technologies World show, I wrote that this year's conference may be a safer and less surprising show than last year's, as it's the first one since the company rejoined the public market and thus became beholden once again to the whims of shareholders.

Now we've come out the other side, I think I can say with some degree of confidence that this most certainly was not the case. Over the last three days, CEO Michael Dell has announced a raft of ambitious additions to his company's portfolio of products and services, swinging for the fences with offerings like data centres-as-a-service, numerous hardware updates and a new collection of cloud-adjacent services.

The most persistent connection between all of the announcements made at the show was that the vast majority of them were powered or enabled in some way by VMware. For the past three years, VMware hasn't had an overwhelmingly large role in Dell's show, saving most of its announcements and updates for its own event in August. This year, however, a huge part of the conference was given over to Dell-branded solutions that relied on VMware technology.

To me, this indicates that the two companies are finally starting to operate in true alignment, which is interesting for a number of reasons. Dell and VMware have an unusual relationship; the virtualisation firm joined Dell as part of the merger with EMC, becoming one of the seven businesses that make up the 'Dell Technologies' umbrella brand. However, it's still a publicly-traded company; Dell (the company, not the man) is the majority shareholder with 80% of the stock, but it's not the sole owner which means it doesn't have absolute authority over the decisions made by CEO Pat Gelsinger.

In the past, this has led to what has felt at times like a battle of wills between the two companies. Dell's messaging has focused on pushing the entire family of companies as a cohesive whole, but Gelsinger has seemingly made a point of distancing VMware from this notion to some degree. This week was an exception to this pattern; although there were still elements of tension between the two stances, it felt for the most part like VMware was singing from Dell's song-sheet.

The result is a series of deep and powerful integrations between Dell EMC hardware and VMware software that make Dell an even bigger force to be reckoned with. Given the crucial role VMware plays in most data centres, ensuring that Dell's infrastructure is optimised for VMware (and vice versa) makes it a very compelling proposition indeed.

On the other hand, arguably one of the most significant announcements of the week had nothing to do with Dell. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella joined Dell and Gelsinger on stage to reveal that full, native VMware support will be coming to Azure. It's one of a scant handful of times that all three executives have appeared onstage together and while the news itself is important enough - it means that Google Cloud Platform is essentially the only type of infrastructure that doesn't support VMware, for one thing - it also indicates just how far Microsoft has come in its efforts to shed its previous mentality of self-sufficiency and adopt a new partner-friendy ethos.

All in all, this year's Dell Technologies World looks like a rather successful one, showcasing an impressive array of new developments but also a confident and unified company that's boldly pursuing its goals and setting out its stall as one of the biggest names in future-proof infrastructure.

As part of its annual Dell Technologies World conference in Las Vegas, tech giant Dell has unveiled a barrage of new and updated hardware products which are set to hit the market later this year.

With updates to virtually every segment of its portfolio, including storage, servers, laptops, networking and more, the new hardware covers use-cases such as employee mobility, AI development, cloud data backup and more.

The announcements follow a number of updates to the company's software and services businesses, including a VMware-powered data centre-as-a-Service product, support for VMware on Microsoft Azure and a new endpoint management service. All of the company's announcements have been primarily aimed at supporting and enabling digital transformation, with a particular focus on enabling multi-cloud infrastructure deployment model.

Dell Latitude

Across its business laptop portfolio, Dell has updated three of its key ranges: the Latitude, Vostro and Precision families. The new Latitude 3000, 5000 and 7000 ranges offer a number of features designed to make workers more productive while on the move, as well as support for Intel's 8th-gen vPro processors. The 7000-series, which comes in 13in and 14in sizes as well as the 12in Latitude 7200 2-in-1, can be fitted with up to 32GB of RAM and include features such as 4x4 Cat16 cellular antennae and an inbuilt privacy screen to minimise unwanted snooping.

The 5000-series, meanwhile, is available in 13in, 14in and 15in variants, all of which use a reinforced carbon fibre chassis. Configuration options include full HD, narrow-bezel and touchscreen displays, along with 8th-gen Intel processors and dedicated graphics chips. The range also includes the Latitude 5300 2-in-1, a 13in device weighing in at a hefty 1.4kg with a full HD screen, up to 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage capacity.

At the entry level, the Latitude 3000-series covers 13in, 14in and 15in sizes, and starts at an agreeable $599 (459). The new Latitude portfolio offers a number of additional features, such as fast-charging which Dell says provides up to 80% charge in just one hour or 35% in 20 minutes, as well as intelligent WiFi which automatically connects to the strongest available network. They can also be configured with security features like smart card readers, biometric authentication and Dell's SafeBIOS tool.

Dell Vostro

Moving onto the Vostro range - primarily geared towards smaller businesses - Dell has launched two new models. The Vostro 13 5000 is a 13in device weighing less than 1.2kg and measuring 14.9mm; Dell claims it's the thinnest and lightest Vostro ever. It features a full HD screen, and super-slim bezels reminiscent of the company's flagship XPS 13.

For those that need slightly more power, the Vostro 15 7000 comes with a 6-core Core i7 Coffee Lake-H processor and built in Nvidia GTX 1650 GPU at the top end. Like its smaller stablemate, it also uses a narrow-bezel full HD display.

Dell Precision workstations

In terms of performance, the top end of Dell's laptop range is occupied by its Precision workstations. Some models can go for upwards of 2,500, but Dell is also catering to thriftier businesses (as well as students and amateur creatives) with the newest entries to the Precision family.

The Precision 3540 and 3541 mobile workstations are designed to offer a balance between affordability and processing horsepower. The 3540 supports quad-core 8th-gen Intel processors, 32GB of DDR4 RAM, with 2TB of storage and AMD's Radeon Pro GPUs. The 3541 is even more well-equipped, featuring a maximum spec that includes an 8-core, 9th-gen Intel processor or a 6-core Xeon chip, as well as professional-grade Nvidia Quadro graphics with 4GB of memory.

Both laptops use a 15.6in display and weigh in at less than 2kg. Like all of Dell's workstations, they're also both ISV certified for use with professional software like Solidworks and Autodesk.

Storage

Data centre infrastructure was not neglected, either. New entries have been added to Dell EMC's storage portfolio, data protection and hyperconverged infrastructure ranges, as well as other lines.

Dell's Isilon range of scale-out NAS appliances is being joined by the new Isilon H5600, a 4U appliance which Dell claims offers improved rack density, throughput and memory and SSD caching. The company is touting its applicability for entertainment and media customers in particular, and the new product is supported by updates to its OneFS software which now allows for up to 252 nodes for a total capacity of 58PB.

Dell's PowerMax storage product is also getting updated to support Intel Optane DC persistent memory drives, which Dell says will halve its latency. PowerMax drives with Optane DC memory will be ready to ship by the end of the year. A new PowerMax plugin to manage VMware vRealize Orchestrator has also been made available, while the Container Storage Interface API for container management and Ansible Playbooks are coming this summer.

For organisations that want to adopt a multi-cloud strategy, the company has launched new Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services, which enables customers to consume storage running on Dell's Unity, PowerMax and Isilon appliances on a cloud-like model, connected to AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform or VMware on AWS. The appliances are hosted by an MSP and connected directly to the cloud, allowing for on-demand cloud deployment, automated disaster recovery, analytics and other use-cases.

The crown jewel of the company's storage announcements, however, was the new Unity XT appliance. Aimed at the mid-range market, this 2U rack storage box features dual active controllers, dual socket Intel Skylake CPUs and supports NVMe drives. It's user-upgradeable too, and Dell says that it takes just 10 minutes to install and 15 minutes to configure. It's got 50% more drives than the previous generation of Unity storage, delivers twice the performance, 75% better response times and supports more than 50% more VMs. It's also apparently capable of a hefty 5:1 reduction in data rates.

Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services will be generally available starting later this month, with availability for the new Isilon and Unity platforms following in June and July respectively.

Data protection

The power of data was (as always) a key theme at the conference this year, so it's fitting that Dell launched new data protection products as well. First up, the company's all-new PowerProtect software platform offers fast and simple backup and replication functionalities, as well as automated policy-based backups for VMware vSphere environments. This is accompanied by the PowerProtect X400 hardware appliance, a 2U rack-mounted appliance powered by Intel Xeon processors, which is available in all-flash or hybrid configurations with a starting capacity of 64TB and a maximum limit of 448TB on the flash model. It also uses artificial intelligence for automatic load-balancing.

Dell also announced a lower-capacity variant of its Integrated Data Protection Appliance DP4400. Aimed at smaller businesses, the new model offers 8-24TB and can be upgraded to a maximum capacity of 96TB. The DP4400 will be available starting from this month, while the PowerProtect platform is expected in July.

Networking

In addition to storage, new networking products were also shown off. The company announced the Dell EMC SD-WAN Edge, an integrated platform that combines Dell hardware with VMware's SD-WAN software, offering it to customers as a subscription-based package. On top of that, Dell's consulting arm will now offer advisory, design and implementation services to any company looking at rolling out an SD-WAN deployment.

The company's network switch business has been rebranded too: it's now known as the PowerSwitch portfolio, in order to bring it into closer alignment with the PowerEdge, PowerMax and PowerProtect families. The first products under this new umbrella will be the PowerSwitch S5200-ON range, available in 12-port, 24-port and half-width versions and supposedly offering a 2.5x improvement in performance versus previous models.

HCI and servers

Finally, the company's server and compute portfolios also grew. Dell's hyperconverged infrastructure family is joined by a new rack-mounted 2U VxFlex appliance to complement the VxFlex integrated rack, which was formerly known as VxRack FLEX. Powered by Intel's Xeon Scalable chips, these HCI products allow customers to take advantage of Dell's offering without the need to be fully standardised on VMware infrastructure.

For customers exploring machine learning, the Dell EMC DSS 8440 is a monster dual-socket 4U server designed for training AI models. It features twin Intel processors, up to 10 NVMe and SAS drives and a maximum of ten Nvidia Tesla V100 Tensor Core machine learning processors, and Dell has partnered with an accelerator startup to optimise it for model training tasks. The DSS 8440 will be hitting the market in Q2 this year, and the new VxFlex appliance will arrive in July.

Dell is aiming to take the hassle out of configuring and deploying laptops, with the launch of a new endpoint management platform that brings together a number of the company's technologies and services.

The platform, dubbed the Dell Technologies Unified Workspace, is designed to give IT departments a simple and automated platform for managing devices.

Based on VMware's Workspace One product, the Unified Workspace allows IT departments to order devices which are imaged, configured and provisioned with all of the customer's business applications before they leave the factory, including the ability to personalise which applications are installed on a per-user basis. When customers receive their devices, Dell said, end users will be able to start working in minutes, as opposed to hours.

The platform also supports endpoint management tasks over the entire lifecycle of corporate devices, including automated patch deployment, device health and status information, and cloud-based policy tools. In line with Dell's emphasis on the importance of data analysis, the Unified Workspace will collect and collate data from customers' device fleets, which will allow IT departments to analyse usage patterns and identify their most widely-used apps.

To ensure security, the Unified Workspace platform integrates with tools from SecureWorks and CrowdStrike, including off-host BIOS storage and verification, threat intelligence data, behavioural analytics and more. In addition, the platform includes integrated support capabilities to allow IT to shorten the time it takes to resolve helpdesk tickets.

Customers can also spread the cost over monthly instalments via Dell Financial Services' PC-as-a-Service offering, which offers a cloud-style consumption-based payment model for physical devices.

"No setup, no imaging, no provisioning, no installation," said Dell vice chairman of products and operations Jeff Clarke. "No configuration is, we like to say, no problem."

These capabilities aren't new, however; the company already offers all of them, in the form of services like the Dell ProDeploy Client Suite and ProSupport.

Rather, the Dell Technologies Unified Workspace combines all of these functions into a single, unified console.

The value for customers comes from the simplicity and time savings that this centralisation can bring, along with the benefits of rolling all of the various costs into one monthly fee.

Alongside this new service, Dell also unveiled a brand new Data Centre-as-a-Service offering, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. Coming as part of the newly-launched Dell Technologies Cloud portfolio, the offering is a fully managed VMware cloud solution, controlled through VMware's cloud management console and deployed on Dell EMC hardware within the customer's own data centre.

The aim is to allow customers to seamlessly move their workloads between public cloud, on-premise infrastructure and edge installations, with VMware acting as a central, consistent infrastructure layer.

Micheal Dell has predicted that within the next three decades, technology could cure blindness, paralysis and even death.

Speaking at the opening keynote of his company's annual conference, the founder and CEO highlighted the potential of technology to help advance human civilisation.

"For me, Dell has always been about a culture of technology, optimism, a belief that technology accelerates human progress," he said. "It's been an honor to play the role with all of you in a period of unprecedented and unmatched advancement, from life expectancy and infant mortality to vaccinations and basic health, to literacy and girls in school to economic growth rates and poverty rates."

Sustainability and corporate social responsibility is something that Dell Technologies frequently talks about; the company is always keen to mention its efforts to reduce its own carbon footprint, and also used the opening keynote to highlight how Dell's engineers are helping to provide 3D-printed prosthetic limbs to children.

"Humankind has made astonishing progress during the last three and a half decades. The democratization of technology and the simultaneous connected rise in human progress has been nothing short of miraculous," Dell said. But the fact is, that was all just a pregame show."

"How about some real progress, like the eradication of death, and blindness, and paralysis through neural implants, robotics and AI? A new age of miracles is literally just around the corner."

He also warned that technologists have a responsibility to ensure that these tools are being developed and used in appropriate ways. Dell compared technology to fire - which, he pointed out, could burn down a village but can also warm a home. This is a favourite analogy of Dell's: he also used it at last year's conference in reference to fears about the dangers of AI.

"We are technologists. and we share an awesome responsibility. We are codifying the world we're creating a digital in of reality, an alternate universe.... It's in that universe - the digital universe - that we find our greatest expression of potential, and our greatest future achievements," Dell said. "It's up to us to ensure that technology reflects our humanity and our values. Because while technology can amplify human genius, it can also amplify human frailty."

In another oft-repeated theme, he also talked about the importance of data, which he called "our most important resource" due to the fact that it's "not only completely renewable, [but] also inexhaustible". Data, he said, can be used to help improve governments, companies and healthcare organisations.

"When it comes to using data to build a better world, it's a cleaner world, a more efficient and more productive, a more egalitarian, a more hopeful, and a more humane world."

Dell EMC is planning on tripling the amount of AMD-based servers in its portfolio, following the success of the chip manufacturer's EPYC range.

AMD spent a long time in the wilderness, playing second fiddle to main rival Intel across both the desktop and server markets. Its Zen microarchitecture, however, has been met with widespread acclaim, with Zen-based chips offering a noticeably lower TCO than equivalent Intel parts. In our tests, EPYC-based servers from Dell EMC, Broadberry and HPE all showcased phenomenal per-core performance for an excellent price.

This has not gone unnoticed by Dell. The company currently offers three server platforms that use AMD chips but Dominique Vanhamme, the company's EMEA vice president and general manager for storage and compute told IT Pro that the company is planning to triple the number of AMD-based platforms it offers by the end of the year.

"Out of, let's say, 50 or so platforms that we have today," he said, "three of them are AMD - we'll probably triple that by the end of this year."

He also confirmed that Dell EMC will be launching servers powered by AMD's newest architecture - a 7nm architecture codenamed 'Rome' - in the second half of 2019.

While AMD will still be a minority among Dell's server platforms, this planned expansion is in contrast to comments made by Dell EMC CTO John Roese last year, who told IT Pro that Intel was still "the big player" in the market and that the company had no plans to substantially increase its AMD offering, stating "don't expect it to be a duopoly any time soon".

A significant barrier to AMD's growth in the server market, as Vanhamme pointed out, is that any workloads that currently run on Intel servers will need to be re-validated to run on AMD-powered hardware. Given Intel's relative stranglehold on the market, this means that a full AMD migration is likely to be a major project for any sizeable company.

One of the primary driving factors behind this expansion of AMD platforms is a growing demand from customers, according to Vanhamme. The lower TCO offered by AMD's EPYC chips is a large factor, he says; along with a cheaper list price, many EPYC chips use fewer cores and sockets to match the performance of equivalent Intel systems, which means that CIOs can save money on per-core and per-socket licensing costs. Lower power consumption is also attractive, he said.

One thing that surprised Vanhamme was the demand for EPYC servers from general-purpose customers. For example. high-performance computing was expected to be the biggest revenue driver, due to the per-core and per-socket performance advantages, but general demand has been surprisingly strong.

"So in the original plan, we were thinking that it will be a few first verticals that will pick up, like service providers," he said. "We thought that maybe there are some hosters that may want to have that extra capacity when they provide IaaS services. We clearly see HPC, but we also see general customers for sure."

Dell EMC beat the competition soundly when it launched its 14th-Gen PowerEdge R740xd - this was the first production server to show off Intel's Xeon Scalable processors. It impressed us when we reviewed it over 18 months ago and now the R740xd2 aims to do the same.

The R740xd2 is a very different beast: this 2U rack server shows off a radical chassis redesign with the focus firmly on delivering maximum storage capacity. Targeting storage-centric workloads such as video surveillance, big Exchange mailboxes, media streaming and software-defined storage, it crams in no less than 26 internal LFF hard disks.

This isn't to the detriment of processing power as the R740xd2 has room for dual Xeon Scalable CPUs with its thermal design only restricting these to Gold models up to 22 cores. Memory capacity is much lower than the R740xd, with this server's 16 DIMM slots supporting up to 512GB.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd2 review: Storage technology

The R740xd2 achieves its enormous storage potential with a clever internal design that consists of two stacked drive trays each with 12 LFF hot-swap bays. To access the inner tray, you simply flip down the locking levers on each side of the front tray and pull it forward.

Keep on pulling the front tray and it will eventually latch on to the inner tray and bring it all the way forward for easy access from a rack cabinet. You won't need to bring the server down either as power and interface cables for both trays are protected by plastic chain-style guards so they won't get snagged.

Due to cooling requirements, you shouldn't leave the trays fully exposed for more than five minutes. Drive bays 25 and 26 are located at the rear in a separate hot-swap cage which reduces the number of available PCI-e slots to two.

The review system includes a full house of 8TB Dell Exos 12Gb/sec NL-SAS drives, all managed by an HBA330P Mini SAS3 snap-in card - which doesn't provide RAID capabilities. If you want these, Dell offers the PERC H730P Mini which fits in the same dedicated slot and brings stripes and mirrors plus RAID5, 6, 10, 50 and 60 arrays into play.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd2 review: Expansion, cooling and power

Our review system came with the standard dual embedded Gigabit ports along with a dual Gigabit SFP LOM mezzanine card. There are plenty of other network options with Dell offering dual-port 10GbE and 25GbE LOMs and a range of standard PCI-e adapters.

For more expansion potential don't specify the rear drive cage as without this, you'll have enough room for five PCI-e slots. We also had Dell's BOSS (boot optimized storage solution) dual 240GB M.2 SSD card which can be dedicated to the OS, leaving all main drive bays free for data duties.

The CPUs are located to the right side of the chassis with the second CPU and attendant DIMM modules lurking underneath the rear drive cage. Internally, the server does looks a little busy but we found every component can be easily accessed for maintenance and upgrades.

Cooling is handled by six fan modules spread in a line behind the inner drive tray. These are the cold-swap variety and we found them a little fiddly to extract as they have to be unplugged from the motherboard power connectors.

Fully populated systems require dual 1100W hot-plug PSUs and combining these with the 26 drives does create a hunger for power. With our system in idle, we measured it drawing 572W rising to 665W with its pair of Gold 5120 CPUs under extreme pressure.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd2 review: Management and deployment

General server management doesn't get any better with Dell's iDRAC9 Enterprise on the case. This presents a smart web interface offering tons of information about system and storage status, performance and power consumption along with remote control and hardware inventory.

The iDRAC9 has a sharp focus on security with a System Lockdown mode stopping users making any configuration changes. It also delivers full supply chain security as firmware packages are cryptographically signed.

We run Dell's OpenManage Enterprise 3.1 in the lab as a Hyper-V VM and after discovering the server, it presented plenty of details on general operations. It also provides fault alerting services, direct access to the server's virtual console, inventory and remote power controls for all managed devices.

We also use Dell's OMM (OpenManage Mobile) on our iPad but were disappointed to find the R740xd2 doesn't support the Quick Sync 2 Bluetooth module for walk-up access. No matter, as we could remotely monitor the server by entering the iDRAC9 IP address into OMM.

Deployment is a cinch; we used the iDRAC9 remote console to map a Windows Server 2016 ISO to the R740xd2 as a virtual drive. We handed this over to the Lifecycle Controller feature for installation and selected the BOSS card as the destination.

With Windows Server 2016 at the helm, the RX740xd2 makes the perfect partner for Windows Storage Spaces. From the Server Management console, we could see all 26 hard disks and use them to create multiple storage pools with virtual drives and volumes, enable data deduplication and present NAS shares and IP SANs.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd2 review: Verdict

The PowerEdge R740xd2 puts Dell EMC ahead of the pack in the storage game as no other blue-chip has anything that comes close to this. Cramming 26 LFF drives into a 2U chassis is no mean feat and Dell EMC's crafty design allows it to deliver plenty of Xeon Scalable power as well as a truly massive storage density.

Verdict

Great design and plenty of power makes the PowerEdge R740xd2 the perfect choice for businesses that want the maximum storage capacity in their rack cabinets

Chassis: 2U rack

CPU: 2 x 2.2GHz Intel Xeon Gold 5120

Memory: 256GB ECC DDR4 2,667MHz (max 512GB)

Storage bays: 26 x LFF hot-swap SAS/SATA (24 internal, 2 rear)

Storage controller: Dell HBA330P Mini SAS3 (Non-RAID)

Storage included: 26 x 8TB Dell Exos NLSAS 3 LFF hard disks

Network: 2 x Gigabit, 2 x Gigabit SFP LOM

Expansion: 2 x PCI-e 3.0 slots (max 5 without rear drive cage)

Other: BOSS with 2 x 240GB SATA SSDs (RAID1)

Power: 2 x 1100W Platinum hot-swap PSUs

Management: Dell iDRAC9 Enterprise

Warranty 3yrs on-site NBD

Dell EMC aims to retake the mid-range storage market with an 'aggressive counter-attack' on the competition. In a bold pincer movement, it has updated its entire SC storage array family and introduced a future-proof storage loyalty program with 3-year satisfaction and efficiency guarantees.

Along with a hardware refresh across its hybrid SC arrays, it introduces two new all-Flash models and in this exclusive review, we look at the SC5020F. This was provided with the latest SCOS 7.3 software which delivers improved performance, higher storage capacities and new management features.

The SC5020F comes as standard with every advanced feature enabled with a perpetual license. The line-up is impressive and includes intelligent deduplication and compression, storage federation, data progression, RAID tiering, thin snapshots, replication, all management tools and much more.

Dell EMC SC5020F: Hardware

The SC5020F employs a 3U rack chassis with dual, active/active hot-plug controllers. Each is equipped with an octa-core 2.4GHz Xeon E5-2630 v3 CPU and 64GB of DDR4 cache memory.

It supports up to 30 internal SFF SSDs and can be expanded hugely outside the box. Using SC420F 24-bay SAS3 expansion shelves, the drive count can be pushed to 222 per array and more when configured as a federated array with up to 10 members.

Each controller comes with four 10GBaseT data ports plus PCI-Express and mezzanine card slots. Dell EMC now offers 100GbE as well as 10GbE and 25GbE adapters plus 8/16Gbps and 32Gbps FC options.

The SC5020F supports read- and write-intensive SSDs and Dell EMC advised us it expects most customers to be using it to handle read intensive workloads. To this end, our review system came with 30 1.92TB read-intensive SAS3 SSDs spread equally across the head unit and an SC420F expansion shelf.

Dell EMC SC5020F: SCOS standard features

The SC5020F supports two storage tiers of read- and write-intensive SSDs and SCOS uses profiles to control which tiers data should reside on and how data progression is managed. RAID array creation is automatic as SCOS selects them to suit each tier with options for RAID0, 5, 6, 10 and dual-mirrored arrays.

Physical storage is amalgamated into a Disk Folder pool within which virtual volumes are created and mapped to selected data ports. Storage profiles determine when data tiering occurs and its scheduler can be used to run this as often as every five minutes.

Profiles apply deduplication and compression which can be enabled globally or on selected volumes. Quality of service (QoS) profiles limit available bandwidth to selected volumes and can use IOPS or MB/sec values or both together.

Dell EMC SC5020F: SCOS 7.3 new features

Distributed sparing is designed to avoid wasted space on high-value, high-capacity SSDs. Our 1.92TB read-intensive SSDs are certainly far too pricey to use as global hot-spares sitting idle in standby.

Distributed sparing takes advantage of the fact that SC arrays manage RAID protection at the page level. This allows it to take capacity from multiple in-use SSDs and present it as a reserved rebuild space. Along with the cost advantage of having all SSDs in active service, it offers up to a five-fold reduction in array rebuild times.

The Live Volume feature allows volumes to be replicated between SC arrays and SCOS 7.3 increases the number supported from 100 to 500. It now uses the same volume ID between arrays for seamless failover and adds ALAU (asymmetric logical access unit) support allowing MPIO connections to the primary Live Volume to be advertised as optimal and those to the secondary one as non-optimal for failover purposes.

Dell EMC SC5020F: Management

SCOS 7.3 delivers enhanced management features with the Unisphere for SC web server running on both controllers for failover. It presents a well-designed HTML5 interface offering easy access to the array's local storage features.

Next up is the Unisphere Central for SC which runs on a VMware host and manages multiple SC arrays from a central web console. Dell EMC's DSM software gets an update to a 2018 R1 version and you'll need to run this as it can do things that Unisphere for SC can't, such as configuring the Live Migrate and Live Volume functions.

The free CloudIQ cloud-based app shows the status of all arrays and provides health information. It uses call-home data from each array to build up a health picture and after logging in with your Dell EMC support credentials, you can view lists of service actions that need to be performed.

Dell EMC SC5020F: Performance

We focused our performance testing on virtualized environments and used dual Dell EMC PowerEdge R840 Xeon Scalable rack servers running VMware ESX 6.5 and configured as a single cluster. These were connected to the SC5020F via sixteen 16Gbps FC ports and eight VMs were created on the ESX cluster with each running Linux CentOS.

On the SC5020F, we created a total of 32 all-flash volumes which four assigned to each Linux VM. We loaded Iometer on a dedicated Windows Server host, ran the Dynamo load generator remotely on each VM and declared them to Iometer.

Using Iometer 512KB block sizes, we watched our test rig return a total raw sequential read throughput of 13,100MB/sec. Moving to random operations saw a slight increase in throughput to 13,175MB/sec.

Changing to a 4KB block size saw a random read throughput of 410,000 IOPS. Our workload test used the same block size with an 80/20 random read/write distribution and this returned an equally impressive 280,000 IOPS.

Dell EMC SC5020F: Verdict

The SC5020F is very competitively priced for mid-sized businesses and with every advanced storage feature included, there are no worries about future investment in extra licenses. Available as a free update to existing SC customers, SCOS 7.3 also delivers an extensive range of new features and performance improvements.

The Unisphere management tools are a welcome addition although we found the DSM app will still be required for some storage configuration tasks. The SC5020F is easy to deploy and delivered good performance on our lab tests while Dell EMC's 3-year storage efficiency and satisfaction guarantees will provide that all-important peace of mind.

Verdict

The SC5020F is a great choice for mid-sized businesses that want a high performing all-Flash array at a sensible price and solid guarantees that it will deliver in the long term

Chassis: 3U rack

Storage: 30 x SFF hot-swap drive bays

Power: 2 x hot-plug 1485W PSUs

Cooling: 2 x hot-plug fan modules

Dual hot-swap controllers each with the following:

CPU: 2.4GHz 8-core Xeon E5-2630 v3

Memory: 64GB DDR4

Array support: RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 10 DM

Storage (SC5020F): 15 x 1.92TB SSDs

Storage (SC420F): 15 x 1.92TB SSDs

Max storage: 222 drives per array

Expansion: 1 x PCIe slot, 1 x mezzanine slot

Network: 4 x 10GBaseT, 16 x 16Gbps FC, Gigabit management

Software: Dell SCOS 7.3

Management: Unisphere for SC, Unisphere Central for SC, Dell EMC Storage Manager 2018 R1

This year's Dell conference has been a somewhat paradoxical affair. The newly-rebranded Dell Technologies World 2018 was the company's largest ever event, with some 14,000 attendees, but in spite of this, it felt noticeably quieter than last year's show.

If I had to guess, I'd say this is probably because last year's show was such a blow-out. In that year, Dell pulled out all the stops to launch a truly staggering number of product updates across virtually all of its lines, while this time around we didn't see anything like as many.

That's not to say that there wasn't anything for Dell customers to get excited about, though. The company used the show to debut two new servers aimed at hefty data analytics workloads which it claims are the fastest in their category, as well as a new all-flash storage array that's supposedly twice as fast as any of the competition. Bold claims, to be sure we'll have to wait until we can get them in the labs before we can see if they hold water.

There's some even more interesting hardware developments on the horizon, however. Product VP Jeff Clarke gave attendees a sneak preview of a new server product set to be launched later this year the PowerEdge MX. This modular system will supposedly offer customers the pinnacle of customisable infrastructure, and it looks like a very interesting proposition indeed. Certainly one to watch in the back half of 2018.

Dell executives had a primary message one of unity between the firm's various constituent business. The company is looking to cement its hold on business IT by increasing the number of customers who buy from multiple companies under the Dell Technologies banner, so the show was heavy on emphasising how well VMware, VxRail, Pivotal, et cetera all work together.

Overall though, this year's show gave the impression that Dell Technologies is in a holding pattern. While there were a few announcements made at the show, there was little in the way of actual substance. To me, this implies that Dell is battening down the hatches in preparation for some big changes, and further fuels rumour that the company is poised to rejoin the public stock market.

It will be interesting to see how such a move pans out for Dell both the company and the man. When Michael Dell originally took the company private five years ago, it's understood that one of his principle reasons for doing so was to get out from under the thumb of investors like Carl Icahn. The fact that the company is planning a return to the market could indicate that Dell feels he now has enough clout to take on Icahn and his ilk directly.

Something tells us that we could be looking at a very different Dell World next year.

Image: Shutterstock

Like many enterprise technology companies, Dell has put much of its focus over the last few years on the concept of digital transformation, whereby companies use techniques like data analysis, DevOps methodologies and agile practices to become more productive and innovative.

Dell has made a big deal out of the importance of digital transformation, calling it the future of business, and essentially telling attendees to this year's Dell Technologies World conference in Las Vegas that they either need to digitally transform or face extinction.

It's tempting to dismiss all of this hype as little more than a shallow marketing ploy designed to move more products, but Dell is practising what it preaches, too. It may be a tech company, but as a 34-year-old international enterprise, it faces many of the same challenges that its customers are, and it's using digital transformation and DevOps to solve them.

One of the company's oft-repeated mantras is the maxim 'people, process, technology' - the three areas businesses need to address if they want to enact change within their organisations.

For Dell, this idea is the cornerstone of successful business transformation, and according to Bask Iyer, CIO of Dell Technologies and VMware, it's something that the company keeps coming back to. Iyer is responsible for Dell's internal IT, so it's his responsibility to ensure that all the idealistic notions about agility and digital transformation that Dell's leadership team espouse actually function in practice.

"Even in Dell, we still have to go back and say ' people, process, technology' - and culture. And I had to sell it to my executive teams and so on," Iyer tells IT Pro. "Of course, they get it very quickly because they're tech folks, but you can't take it for granted. I had to present it at the quarterly business reviews, and all these folks questioned me, challenged me - like they would, like normal businesspeople - and then supported me after that."

People

DevOps is one of the methodologies and techniques most commonly employed as part of a digital transformation strategy, so it's no surprise that Dell is also making full use of it within its own organisation. However, Iyer told IT Pro that the company had to make some changes to how it thinks and talks about DevOps in order to fully implement it.

"If you just say 'agile, DevOps, CI/CD'," says Iyer. "It's very geeky and confusing for the business. These are not business terms. So, similar to what GE did with SixSigma and what Toyota did with the Toyota Way, we've come up with Dell Digital. That's the business language."

Iyer believes it's critical to involve the business in digital transformation projects, or risk those projects failing.

"You need end-users to sit with you in your war rooms and do pair programming with you. Just IT being efficient isn't going to create digital transformation, so we had to transform the methodology within the company. Agile for us is not just an IT practice - users have to want to come there."

Bringing line-of-business employees into the IT conversation is key, then, but Iyer also points out that to truly benefit from DevOps, these staff must stop assuming that they can simply punt technical projects over to IT and wash their hands of them.

Process

For this reason, Dell's DevOps strategy is largely prescriptive. According to Iyer, in order to facilitate that kind of close collaboration in an organisation with around 145,000 employees, you need to lay down some defined guidelines and ground rules. This, he says, is a large part of the 'process' element of the 'people, process, technology' approach.

Digital transformation and DevOps are most successful when they're driven or supported by executives and business leaders at the top levels of an organisation. Executive buy-in gives staff the freedom to experiment with these methodologies at their own pace, rather than feeling pressured to deliver results and justify the project as quickly as possible.

Thankfully, Iyer says, this isn't a problem at Dell. He claims founder and CEO Michael Dell is keen to embrace new technologies and ways of working, and has absolutely no problem engaging with the company's agile processes personally.

Pair-programming with Michael Dell

In fact, Michael Dell himself ended up collaborating directly with one of the company's rank-and-file engineers in order to get a project done. Iyer relays a story around one Thanksgiving weekend, when Dell texted him to ask if his team could put together a map showing the company's global orders.

After a very brief discussion, Iyer gave the project to some of Dell's engineers in India and Austin. "These guys start developing it," he says. "No requirements, no specs, no funding discussion, nothing - they just start coding."

The following Monday, Iyer received an email with a link to a functional, production version of the tool that Michael Dell had asked for, which he duly forwarded to the CEO. Then, Iyer said, his boss did something unusual.

"He just went to the actual programmer - directly, he didn't copy me [into the email] - and said 'what is this, and can you make this change'. The guy did it, and he freaks out - he's getting an email from Michael Dell," Iyer laughs.

The programmer, he explains, was messaging his colleagues, panicking over what he should say to Dell and continually copying Iyer into his responses to him. "Finally, I tell him 'dude, please don't copy me. You can always update me in a one-on-one. You're doing pair programming with Michael; that's what's happening.'"

Understandably, this story quickly spread throughout Dell, but Iyer believes it illustrates a broader point about the company's culture, and how the business can contribute to IT projects. "If he has time to do that, you [someone from the business side] have time to get in the dojo and explain your requirements to me," he states.

Picture of Michael Dell, credit: Oracle PR/Hartmann Studios (under Creative Commons license)

Following the massive refresh of its data centre hardware portfolio last year, Dell has launched a number of new product updates across its server, storage and hyper-converged infrastructure lines.

The announcements, made as part of the company's inaugural Dell Technologies World conference, are targeted around data-driven digital transformation projects.

Digital transformation is a big strategic focus for Dell, and a large part of what's driving the digital transformation revolution is machine learning and data analytics. In order to support these workloads, Dell has unveiled two new quad-socket PowerEdge servers, with support for up to four Xeon Scalable processors and 6TB of memory.

Built to power data analytics workloads, the new 4U PowerEdge R940xa is designed to be a performance powerhouse. It twins four Xeon Scalable processors with four Nvidia Tesla GPUs (or up to eight full-height FPGAs) and up to four direct-attached NVMe storage drives for super low latency.

"This darn thing is unbelievably fast - we just set a new record for the SAP Linux benchmark, and it beat that benchmark by over 90%," said Dell's vice president of products and operations, Jeff Clarke. "This thing is an absolute beast; a badass in the marketplace."

The PowerEdge R840 is a 2U server, which Clarke claims is three-and-a-half times faster than any other four-socket server currently in the market. It has 24 direct-attached NVMe drives for more than 150TB of total storage, as well as a fully integrated ultra-path interconnect.

Both models support FPGAs, and include Dell's outstanding OpenManage Enterprise and its latest iDRAC9 monitoring software, and will be available starting from 22 May.

Additionally, Dell has updated its hyperconverged infrastructure products, starting with VxRail. The new VxRail offerings support NVMe drives at the cache layer, dual-socket Xeon Scalable CPUs (with a maximum collective RAM allocation of 3TB per node), and Nvidia Tesla P40 GPU accelerators for better VDI performance, as well as 25GbE networking and simplified management tools.

For customers looking to deploy HCI, Dell Technologies has updated the VxRack SDDC, a turnkey system to help customers achieve the software-defined data centre. Built with the company's new VxRail hardware, the VxRack system now includes support for Vmware's new Cloud Foundation tools.

Dell is also introducing the Dell EMC PowerMax, a re-branded version of the company's VMAX storage product. The all-flash array features end-to-end NVMe storage, as well as support for NVMe-over-Fabrics and Storage Class Memory, and Dell is making bold claims about its performance. According to the company, PowerMax is the fastest array on the market, with double the speed of its nearest competition and up to 10 million IOPS.

The PowerMax also includes an integrated machine learning system, which uses predictive analytics to invisibly optimise the performance of your storage with no human input - Dell claims this is the only cost-effective way to implement SCM. Inline dedupe is also offered, and Dell claims that its compression offers a massive 5:1 ratio in data reduction.

Elsewhere, Dell's XtremIO X2 all-flash arrays have been updated to a new operating system, with the XIOS 6.1 software delivering enhanced metadata-aware replication to reduce bandwidth requirements by 75% and storage requirements at disaster recovery locations by almost 40%, by only replicating new data. For Dell's more budget-conscious customers, the XtremeIO X2 range now includes a new entry-level appliance too, which is less than half the price of the prior model.

One of the most intriguing things Dell had to show off, however, was a sneak peek at its forthcoming PowerEdge MX system - a modular server unit which is designed to allow customers to configure it to their specific needs with multiple compute units sharing certain pooled resources like cooling and power.

"What we are building - and what people want - is the capability to unlock potential energy from their resources," said Dell EMC's president and general manager of server and infrastructure systems, Ashley Gorakhpurwalla. "What they want to be able to do is to be able to utilise the resource to the max that they have built, that they have paid for and that other people consume."

"You need to be able to adapt towards power, thermal, I/O, bandwidth and protocol that doesn't even exist today."

PowerEdge MX will be formally launched in the latter half of the year, with further details to come.

Dell Technologies has revamped its partner programme, offering its channel partners a more streamlined way to sell solutions based on Dell's whole portfolio, in addition to new rewards and incentives.

The new programme, dubbed the Dell Technologies Advantage framework, will sit alongside the existing partner programmes offered by Dell EMC and the other companies which make up Dell Technologies. The Advantage framework offers increased financial and certification benefits for partners who sell across multiple Dell Technologies brands.

"Partners sit at the forefront of helping customers embrace Digital Transformation. At its core, the Dell Technologies business addresses this need and uniquely enables partners with the products, services, financing and programs to make them successful," said Joyce Mullen, president, Global Channel, OEM & IoT Solutions for Dell EMC. "We've seen tremendous growth and momentum over the past year... Our top priority is helping partners solve their customers' complex digital challenges."

The changes to the partner programme are predominantly designed to boost channel revenues for Dell's more niche subdivisions like Pivotal, SecureWorks and RSA, but according to the newly-appointed chair of Dell's EMEA partner alliance, the program brings significant benefits for partners.

"What we said is 'OK, we need extra benefits when we take out a competitive label', said SLTN's founder and CEO Eugene Tuijnman. "Plus we wanted to put in rebate programs, so depending on your certification, your volume, et cetera, you get additional benefits."

"Most of it is based on aligning the programmes of the strategic aligned businesses. The other aspect is that it's much more focused on the longer stretch. So we don't give extra discount up-front; it's much more in the form of a rebate programme - which you can use, for instance, in [marketing development funds]."

Dell has also announced a new programme to help simplify the process of selling data centre infrastructure. The Dell EMC Ready Stack program helps partners to make data centre deployments easier for customers by creating bundles with Dell EMC's storage, servers, data protection and networking products. Partners will also be incentivised for selling Dell's infrastructure products.

For partners who have worked their way up to Titanium Black status in the Dell EMC partner programme, this rating will also be applied across all of Dell's businesses.

Dell is also scrapping the old Partner Advantage and Sell and Earn programmes, replacing them with the new points-based Dell EMC MyRewards Program. This new system includes improved promotional offers with bonus payouts up to three times larger, and offers better rebates for partners around the company's storage products.

Finally, Dell is also launching a series of new 'Solutions Competency' offerings, allowing partners to access high-level training and tools to help them serve customers in specific areas. The first of these new competencies is an IoT solutions competency, which will be available this week. It will be joined later in the year by competencies in high performance computing, data analytics, business applications and security. The company's existing competencies are also set to be expanded later in the year.

While the PC market has been largely stagnant for the past several years, Michael Dell has been bullish on the technology market's potential, predicting that its total value could reach $8 trillion.

Speaking to press and analysts at the company's annual conference in Las Vegas, Dell Technologies' founder and CEO said that he believes current forecasts are actually undervaluing the market.

"I think the market, by the way, is going to grow. I think $3 trillion is wrong; I think it's going to be $4 trillion, $5 trillion, $8 trillion - because technology is right at the centre of everything."

This is despite figures from analyst firms like Gartner, which show that PC shipments have been continuously falling for three and a half years due to longer refresh cycles and more expensive hardware.

On the other hand, Dell's comments come off the back of a healthy period for his business; the company's vice president of products and operations Jeff Clarke announced that for the first quarter of 2018, Dell expects to increase its global share of the PC market for the 21st quarter in a row, as well as growing its server and storage market shares.

According to Gartner's estimates, Dell currently commands just under 20% of the global server market, pulling in revenues of $3.6 billion in Q4 last year. Main rival HPE is nipping at its heels, however, with a market share of 19.3% according to revenue.

"Our customers are responding to the power of our combined company, creating good momentum as we kick off 2018," said Jeff Clarke. "We have exciting announcements planned across our portfolio at this year's event that are driving this leadership and our customers' digital transformation, ultimately resulting in better business outcomes."

May is fast approaching, which means that Dell's annual conference is almost upon us. The yearly shindig has changed its name yet again, going from the post-merger Dell EMC World to Dell Technologies World. For those of you who aren't quite keeping up, Dell Technologies is the overall umbrella organisation, which encompasses VMware, Virtustream, Pivotal, RSA, SecureWorks and (confusingly) both Dell and Dell EMC.

In terms of what we can expect from this year's show, I'm fervently hoping that the answer is 'less stuff'. Last year, if you'll recall, the freshly-unified Dell Technologies updated basically its entire portfolio of enterprise hardware, with a new generation of PowerEdge servers, a fully refreshed storage line including new Isilon and VMax units, and new data protection and networking appliances, as well as a host of updates to other business units like its cloud divisions.

Given that this barrage of new hardware was unleashed just a year ago, I'd be surprised if we saw anything approaching that amount of product refreshes. What we're much more likely to see is a focus on how customers can actually integrate these products into their existing IT stack, with concepts like multi-cloud, hybrid cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure being key talking points.

That said, this year's Dell Technologies World would be a great opportunity to talk about some of the company's client hardware. The most recent output from Dell's XPS, Precision and Optiplex lines, powered by Intel's 8th-generation processors, has been rather impressive, and it would be nice to see more stage time devoted to everyday business machines - although don't hold your breath for any new announcements.

We're also unlikely to see many major product updates from Dell's biggest subsidiaries like VMware or RSA, given that both of them still run their own flagship conferences. Instead, this will be a good opportunity for Dell to spend some time on smaller units like Pivotal and Virtustream - although there's a good chance VMware's Pat Gelsinger will make an appearance to discuss some of the themes that will be foregrounded at VMworld in August.

Speaking of themes, expect data protection and compliance to be a big focus for this year's show. With everyone's favourite piece of data protection legislation now less than a month away from coming into force, GDPR is likely to be a hot topic especially for those companies still working on becoming fully compliant. If I were a gambling man, I'd suggest that the discussion will probably centre on how you can maintain compliance going forward - because much like a dog, the GDPR is for life.

One last thing; rumours continue to circulate that Michael Dell is working on plans to take the company public, after doing the exact opposite with a $25 billion buyout just five years ago. He will accomplish this, so the scuttlebutt says, via a 'reverse merger', in which the publicly-traded VMware buys the privately-owned Dell Technologies - meaning that the latter can be publicly traded without having to jump through all of the expensive and time-consuming hoops associated with an IPO. It's incredibly unlikely that we'll hear anything official about this, but I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for any tell-tale signs...

Dell EMC has embraced AMD's EPYC server processors wholeheartedly by launching three new rack server platforms that aim to offer a cost-effective alternative to Intel's Xeon Scalable Processor (SP) family. In this exclusive review, we look at the PowerEdge R7415 which is designed to deliver an enterprise-class single-socket (1P) server with a tempting storage proposition.

The R7415 is available with a good range of EPYC options and our review system was supplied with a 24-core 2GHz EPYC 7401P. You currently have five other choices, so you can save a pile of cash and go for an entry-level 8-core 2.1GHz 7251 or splash out on a super-strength 32-core 2GHz 7551P or 2.2GHz 7601.

Putting this many cores and threads in a 1P server is no mean achievement and represents a serious alternative to more costly 2P Xeon SP servers. Another bonus is the EPYC SoC (system on chip) has eight integral memory channels and supports a massive 2TB of fast 2,666MHz DDR4 LRDIMM memory -- the lower-end Silver 4100 and Gold 5100 CPUs only support 768GB of 2,400MHz memory per socket.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R7415: Storage features

The R7415 offers plenty of storage options so choose your backplane carefully to save upgrading later on. Base systems start with an 8-drive LFF hot-swap backplane or you can dispense with the optical drive panel and go for a full 12-drive LFF version.

The latter can be upgraded further with an optional dual-drive LFF hot-swap bay that fits at the rear. Next up is a 24-drive SFF hot-swap backplane which comes with an integral SAS expander board allowing a single RAID card to manage them all.

The R7415 supports up to 12 NVMe SSDs and this is facilitated with a special 24-drive backplane that includes 6 dual-port PCI-Express (PCIe) ports. Our review system includes this and the ports are all cabled directly to the PCIe sockets at the rear of the motherboard, allowing universal drive bays 12-23 to support NVMe SSDs or standard SFF hard disks.

The motherboard doesn't have embedded RAID and our system includes the top-dog PERC H740P Mini SATA/SAS3 card which snaps into a dedicated slot on the motherboard and is cabled directly to the backplane SAS expander. Along with support for dual redundant RAID6 arrays, it includes 8GB of NVRAM cache plus battery backup, although only 4GB is currently enabled with the full complement awaiting a future firmware upgrade.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R7415: Design and upgrades

Internally, the server is reasonably well designed - although its six high-performance cooling fan modules are only the cold-swap variety. Replacing a failed fan could be fiddly, as some of the modules have their power connectors obscured by the drive backplane interface cables which will also need removing to gain access.

The CPU and 16 DIMM slots are covered by a large plastic air shroud but to remove this, you'll first need to extract the rear 2-slot PCIe riser card which is retained with three screws. Our system includes a healthy 128GB of DDR4 RDIMM but with Dell EMC only offering 64GB LRDIMM modules, the maximum you can currently go to is 1TB.

The server has dual embedded Gigabit ports and our review system includes the dual-port 10GBase-T mezzanine LOM card which fits in a dedicated slot alongside. Systems without the rear dual-drive LFF bay can use the two PCI-Express slots on the motherboard.

Dell EMC's BOSS (boot optimized storage solution) dual M.2 SSD card does away with the need to put the OS on a hard disk and the card supports mirroring across the SSDs. The R7415 also supports a dual microSD card module which has its own dedicated slot and is designed for running embedded hypervisors.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R7415: Power and management

The price of our system includes two 750W hot-plug PSUs and we found consumption to be very reasonable, with the system pulling 118W in idle and peaking at 270W under heavy CPU load. An HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 with two 12-core 2.3GHz Xeon Gold 5118 CPUs, 64GB of memory and dual 800W PSUs consumed 81W in idle and 272W under extreme load.

Server management is very good; the embedded iDRAC9 controller delivers a well-designed web interface offering plenty of system and component status information. The System screen shows details on power usage and cooling efficiency but is currently missing the performance graphs for the CPU, memory and I/O - Dell EMC is working on a firmware upgrade to remedy this.

The Quick Sync 2 feature is perfect for local management and we used it to connect our iPad over Bluetooth via the OpenManage Mobile (OMM) iOS app. Using OMM to scan the QR code on the pull-out system label, we had the R7415 loaded in seconds and could view all server information, alerts plus health status and launch a remote virtual console.

For general systems management, OpenManage Essentials will soon be replaced with the new OpenManage Enterprise. It's been in development for a long time now but we ran a Hyper-V VM of the latest technical release in the lab and were able to add the server's iDRAC9 to its console, view plenty of details on system status, automate routine maintenance tasks and remotely control its power.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R7415: Verdict

Internal design could be tidier but the PowerEdge R7415 is offering an impressive storage package for the price with plenty of room to expand. With AMD EPYC on-board, it scores over 2P Xeon SP servers for sheer core density and when Dell makes 128GB LRDIMMs available, it'll beat them on memory capacity as well.

Verdict

A great choice for data centres that want a single socket rack server with support for up to 32 CPU cores, a high memory capacity and a sharp focus on storage-centric workloads

Chassis: 2U rack

CPU: 2GHz 24-core AMD EPYC 7401P

Memory: 128GB ECC DDR4 RDIMM (max 2TB with 128GB LRDIMMs)

Storage bays: 24 x SFF hot-swap

RAID: Dell PERC H740P Mini/8GB NVRAM cache/BBU

Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 6, 50, 60

Storage included: 2 x 1TB 7.2K NLSAS, 3 x 1.2TB 10K 12Gbps SAS SFF HDDs

Network: 2 x Gigabit/2 x 10GBase-T Mezzanine LOM

Expansion: 4 x PCI-e 3.0 slots (with riser)

Power: 2 x 750W Platinum Plus hot-swap PSUs

Management: Dell iDRAC9 Enterprise

Warranty: 3Yr ProSupport On-Site NBD

Dell EMC's PowerEdge R6415 shows AMD is back in the server game - and this time it means business. Showing off the new EPYC Series 7000 CPUs, the R6415 is aimed at enterprises that want a no-comprises single-socket server that can handle heavy-duty workloads.

Unlike Intel's Xeon Scalable Processor (SP) family, the EPYC CPUs are single-package SoCs (system on chips) so no chipsets are required. With AMD's Zen core technology at their heart, the EPYCs have eight integral 2,600MHz memory channels supporting up to 2TB as standard, along with 128 PCI-Express (PCIe) lanes.

The bottom line is EPYC is offering enterprises a more affordable alternative to purchasing 2P servers to get the core count, memory capacity and I/O bandwidth they want. EPYC targets the Xeon Scalable Silver and Gold series, which in 1P deployments support up to 768GB of memory, or 1.5TB for the Gold 6100 'M' models.

To put this all into perspective, Dell EMC's elderly PowerEdge R330 was (up until now) its most powerful 1P rack server with support for basic quad-core Xeon E3-1200 v6 CPUs and 64GB of memory. The R6415 blows it out of the water by offering up to 32 physical and 64 logical cores, a 32-fold increase in memory capacity and a host of advanced storage features.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R6415: EPYC processor

Our review system was supplied with a 24-core 2GHz AMD EPYC 7401P partnered by 128GB of memory. Topped off with a large passive heatsink, the CPU socket sits central to the motherboard and is flanked on each side by 8 DIMM slots.

EPYCs with the 'P' designation are designed for single-socket use whereas those without this support 1P and 2P servers. For the latter, both chips use 64 PCIe lanes for inter-socket communication via AMD's Infinity Fabric technology.

Core count and memory capacity are two key areas where EPYC challenges the Xeon SP Silver and Gold series. It can even put more cores in your socket than Xeon SP Platinum as the R6415 is also available with the mighty 32-core 2.2GHz EPYC 7601.

As the EPYC has on-chip memory controllers there's no need to add a second processor to get the maximum capacity. The 16 DIMM slots support RDIMM and LRDIMM memory so, when Dell EMC makes 128GB LRDIMM modules available later this year, you can go right up to the 2TB maximum.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R6415: Deployment and management

The R6415 has the same iDRAC9 controller as its Xeon SP stable-mates so you get a classy set of remote management and security features. Its HTML5 web interface provides a detailed status overview along with plenty of operational data on system and component temperatures, cooling and voltages.

We noticed that the System page is missing the Performance tab and is unable to show usage graphs for the CPU, memory and I/O. Dell EMC advised us that it is currently working on an iDRAC9 update for the AMD architecture.

The embedded LifeCycle Controller made light work of OS deployment and helped us load Windows Server 2016 with all the right drivers inside 30 minutes. An optional feature we highly recommend is the Quick Sync 2 module which costs 180 and sits in the server's left rack mount ear.

This allowed us to connect our iPad directly to the server over Bluetooth and monitor it using the OpenManage Mobile (OMM) iOS app. For general systems management, OpenManage Enterprise is (still!) under development but our Hyper-V VM of the latest technical release worked fine with the R6415 and provided plenty of useful management tools.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R6415: Storage features

Storage is another area where the R6415 beats the current crop of 1P servers. We have the 8 hot-swap SFF bay model with optical drive but you can opt for a quartet of LFF drives or go for a full house of 10 SFF bays.

The latter brings up to 10 PCIe NVMe SSDs into play. The motherboard has five embedded dual-port PCIe sockets which are cabled directly to the corresponding ports on the backplane so you can mix and match hard disks and NVMe SSDs.

The motherboard doesn't have an embedded RAID controller so the minimum required specification is the PERC H330 Mini card which we've included in the price shown. This snaps into a dedicated slot at the rear of the motherboard, is cabled directly to the backplane and supports SATA/SAS3 drives plus stripes, mirrors and RAID5 arrays.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R6415: Power and expansion

Our system includes two hot-swap 550W Platinum PSUs and we found consumption to be comparatively low; the server drew 115W with the OS in idle and 253W with the EPYC under extreme load. A HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen10 with two 12-core 2.3GHz Xeon Gold 5118 CPUs, 32GB of memory and one SFF drive was measured drawing 82W in idle and a higher 282W under load.

Dell EMC's BOSS (boot optimized storage solution) M.2 SSD card isn't currently available for the R6415 but you can add its dual-slot microSD card module. Designed for embedded hypervisors, it supports card capacities up to 64GB and performs mirroring across them.

The R6415 comes with dual embedded Gigabit ports and we've included the dual-port Gigabit LOM card which fits in a dedicated slot. Other options available are dual 10GbE copper and fibre LOMs, or you can add a dual-slot PCIe riser and choose from 10Gbe and 25GbE network adapter cards.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R6415: Verdict

The PowerEdge R6415 is a game changer for single-socket rack servers as with AMD's EPYC on board, it offers an unbeatable core density and memory capacity. A great choice for high-density computing and virtualization, it also comes with impressive storage credentials all packed into a surprisingly compact 1U rack chassis.

Verdict

With AMD’s EPYC at the helm, the PowerEdge R6415 delivers a high core count and memory capacity normally reserved for more expensive and power-hungry 2P rack servers

Chassis: 1U rack

CPU: 2GHz 24-core AMD EPYC 7401P

Memory: 128GB ECC DDR4 RDIMM (max 2TB with 128GB LRDIMMs)

Storage bays: 8 x SFF hot-swap (max 10)

RAID: Dell PERC H330 Mini

Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 50

Storage included: 3 x 1TB 7.2K 12Gbps NLSAS SFF HDDs

Network: 2 x Gigabit/2 x Gigabit Mezzanine LOM

Expansion: 2 x PCI-e 3.0 slots (with optional riser)

Power: 2 x 550W Platinum Plus hot-swap PSUs

Management: Dell iDRAC9 Enterprise

Warranty: 3Yr ProSupport On-Site NBD

VMware is pursuing a new direction as part of its IoT strategy, using hyperconverged infrastructure to offer complete, end-to-end solutions for edge computing.

Following the launch of VMware Pulse IoT Center, which went into general availability in January, VMware is offering a new range of complete IoT packages for various use-cases and applications. The company will be leveraging other areas of parent company Dell Technologies' business particularly its enterprise infrastructure wing, Dell EMC as well as partnering with third-party hardware and software providers.

"Building an edge computing solution today is a time-intensive exercise most enterprises can't afford," said Ray O'Farrell, VMware's executive vice president & chief technology officer. "Today, VMware unveils hyperconverged edge computing solutions that are cost-effective and will enable customers to build and scale secure, use case-specific IoT solutions that work for them from the edge all the way to the cloud, relying on proven, tested software they already use and trust."

The new edge compute packages will feature a suite of server hardware for infrastructure and gateway needs, courtesy of Dell EMC, which will include VMware Pulse IoT Center for monitoring IoT devices.

They will also include local compute capacity and gateway devices to allow for real-time analytics at the edge, with customers able to license business analytics tools from a number of third-party suppliers.

The products will initially be targeted at three verticles: remote locations such as oil rigs where harsh conditions and inconsistent power or data supplies may be a problem, factories where conditions are more stable but still fairly challenging, and retail branches where inter-branch communication is priority.

Although the offering is limited to on-prem deployments for now, a SaaS version is in the pipeline, which customers can trial a beta version of now the SaaS package. However, VMware's vice president of IoT Mimi Spier has stressed the new offering is designed to support a hybrid usage model.

"We're not focused just on on-prem, we are focused absolutely on the hybrid approach, and we believe a hybrid approach is the right approach," she told IT Pro. "The reason why is because even if you have great networking, if you're going to collect petabytes of data from your factory, you probably don't want to pay for the storage costs in the cloud, and you probably don't need all of that data for the deep learning that happens in the cloud."

Instead, she said, customers have been asking for the ability to run certain data analytics tasks locally, allowing them to discard the data needed for these tasks before shuttling the rest of the data up to the cloud for further use.

Two initial solutions have been announced, as part of partnerships with two companies: surveillance and CCTV provider Axis Communications and Wipro. The former has partnered with VMware and Dell EMC to offer connected cameras and 4G routers that will run on Pulse IoT Center, while the latter will offer a complete solution for monitoring factory floor equipment in manufacturing.

Wipro offers its own IoT platform, Looking Glass, which will be combined with Pulse IoT Center; Looking Glass will handle predictive analytics and data processing, while Pulse will help with management, monitoring and security.

While VMware has only announced solutions for two use-cases, the company has indicated it will be developing new partnerships across a wide range of IoT applications to develop further products. Spier also emphasised the need for the simplicity offered by an end-to-end solution, saying: "One of the customers that we're talking about has over 150,000 cameras that they will need to have managed, and that's just one use-case".

The solution is similar to AWS' Greengrass offering, an edge computing product designed to enable IoT operations in remote or inhospitable locations through onboard compute. As IoT attracts more and more attention from major organisations, the race is on to create solutions that will enable them to overcome the challenges that can sometimes hinder the deployment of IoT products.

VMware also announced that, as part of this effort, it will be funding two awards in partnership with the US' National Science Foundation. The prizes will be given to projects researching edge computing data infrastructure, with a total of $6 million up for grabs.

Creative Intellect analyst Bola Rotibi told IT Pro that VMware's move into edge computing is a smart one. "Its announcements for the additional ways in which it would support NFVs and its vision of the interplay between IT Clouds, Public Clouds and Telco Clouds, and how apps will sit between them, highlighted an organisation prepared for supporting different clouds with different players," she said.

"However, the company's recognition that more distributed computing at the edge would require a fleet of servers and hardware at the edge, which would require different ways to secure, ruggedise and manage, was not only a smart insight, but identifies how well placed the company is to both operate and deliver in this new market."

Sitting at the pinnacle of Dell EMC's PowerEdge 14G server family, the R940 delivers a powerful Xeon Scalable package in a compact 3U rack chassis. It's the first 4-socket (4P) system in the 14G lineup and has the thermal capacity to handle every Xeon Scalable model right up to the high-end 28-core chips.

Targeting a broad range of mission critical workloads, it offers an impressive expansion potential with support for 6TB of DDR4 memory, 12 high-performance NVDIMM-N modules and 13 PCI-Express (PCIe) expansion slots. Storage looks good too, as the chassis has room for 24 SFF drives and is geared up for PCIe NVMe SSDs.

It builds hugely on its predecessor, the 13G R930, by offering 50% more NVMe drives plus a third more I/O capabilities and, being 1U shorter, has a higher rack density. Dell EMC claims the R940 offers 27% more cores - although it must have based this on an R930 with four 22-core E7-8800 v4 Xeons and not with the 24-core models, which only yield a 17% increase.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R940 review: Hardware and specs

Our review system delivers a great starter package, with the price including quad 3.6GHz Xeon Gold 5122 CPUs and 32GB of DDR4 memory. These 4-core CPUs represent an affordable entry point into the Xeon Gold family and offer very high per-core performance and support for 2,400MHz DDR4 memory.

Internally, the R940 presents a clever design. Squeezing quad CPUs and 48 DIMM sockets into a 3U chassis is no mean feat and Dell has achieved this with a full-width mezzanine card, or PEM (processor expansion module).

Dell offers the R940 as a 2P option and in this system, the main motherboard in the chassis base has two CPU sockets and 24 DIMMs slots. Our 4P system has the PEM sitting on top which provides the other two CPU sockets plus remaining DIMM slots.

In practise it works very well; after removing the 3-slot PCIe riser cards on each side, the PEM can be swung back on its hinges to provide full access to the mainboard below. Enterprises can start with a 2P system and upgrade to 4P when the time is right by ordering the PEM kit (CPUs and memory are ordered separately).

Dell EMC PowerEdge R940 review: Storage options

Storage features begin with an 8-drive passive backplane which is only available on the 2P model, whereas our 4P system includes the 24-drive active backplane and SAS3 expander board. The backplane also incorporates six dual-port PCIe connectors which enable drive bays 1-4 and 17-24 for NVMe SSDs.

RAID choices start with the embedded PERC S140 chip supporting SATA drives plus stripes, mirrors and RAID5 arrays. Dell EMC offers plenty of PERC 10 RAID controllers and we have the top-dog H740P card with 8GB of NVRAM cache and battery backup.

You can save on storage space with Dell EMC's BOSS (boot optimized storage solution) card which negates the need to put your OS on a hard disk. This bootable PCIe card has dual M.2 SATA SSD slots, supports mirroring and costs around 670 with two 240GB sticks.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R940 review: Expansion, power and cooling

The PCIe slot arrangement is also smart as 2P systems enable the seven slots on the mainboard while in 4P systems, the extra pair of 3-slot risers plug in directly to the PEM. Our H740P RAID card was installed in the first mainboard slot and next door is a dedicated riser slot for Dell EMC's network daughter cards (NDCs).

We have the Broadcom dual 10GbE SFP+/dual 1GbE NDC option which has its own onboard heat-pipes and radiator assembly. Other options include dual 10GBaseT/1GbE, quad 10GbE and dual 25GbE NDCs.

Power is handled by dual 1100W Platinum hot-plug PSUs and for fully-loaded systems, you have 1600W, 2000W and 2400W options. The low 105W TDP of the Gold 5122 CPUs was reflected in our power tests, with the server drawing 145W in idle and peaking at 510W with all CPUs under maximum load.

Cooling has been redesigned and is handled by two banks of four fan modules in front of the motherboard/PEM. Each module is hot-pluggable and for easier access to the drive backplane, the entire assembly can be easily released and removed.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R940 review: Management

The R940 sports Dell EMC's latest iDRAC9 controller which presents a classy HTML5-based web interface. This offers a veritable treasure trove of information on every critical component, a full system inventory, multiple performance graphs and direct configuration access to the PERC RAID controllers.

The iDRAC9 has a sharp focus on security with a System Lockdown mode stopping users making any configuration changes. It also delivers full supply chain security as firmware packages are cryptographically signed.

We're also impressed with the Quick Sync 2 module which is located in the server's left rack mount ear. Pressing the button under the system ID LED activated Bluetooth allowing us to connect our iPad directly to the server via the OpenManage Mobile (OMM) iOS app for on-the-spot diagnostics.

The OpenManage Essentials software is now looking a tad dated and will soon be replaced by OpenManage Enterprise. Although still in development, we loaded a Hyper-V VM of an early technical release and were impressed with the level of management features it provides.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R940 review: Verdict

The PowerEdge R940 delivers a fine combination of Xeon Scalable density and unprecedented expansion potential making it a great choice for handling heavy duty mission-critical apps. Squeezing this amount of raw processing power into a 3U chassis is quite an achievement and we were impressed with the server's clever internal design which allows it to scale easily with demand.

Verdict

The PowerEdge R940 is a hugely powerful 4P Xeon Scalable rack server with masses of room to grow - data centres looking for a big boost in capacity and performance will love it

As reviewed:

Researchers have discovered security flaws in the operating system powering Dell EMC's Isilon storage platform, which could open them up to remote code execution by hackers.

The flaws were discovered by Maximiliano Vidal and Ivan Huertas from Core Security and include nine CVEs that, if exploited, could enable privilege escalation and cross-site request forgery attacks.

"There are no anti-CSRF tokens in any forms on the web interface," a security advisory issued by Core Security read. "This would allow an attacker to submit authenticated requests when an authenticated user browses an attacker-controlled domain."

"The web console contains a plethora of sensitive actions that can be abused, such as adding new users with SSH access or re-mapping existing storage directories to allow read-write-execute access to all users."

Attackers could then use the privilege escalation vulnerabilities to run Python code of shell commands with root access, the advisory warned, and use cross-site scripting to impersonate victims, although researchers also noted that the attack relied on some degree of social engineering.

The flaws, which were first discovered in September last year, affect various versions of Dell EMC's Isilon OneFS software ranging from version 7.1.1.11 to version 8.1.1.0. The company told IT Pro that it has now issued security updates to address the vulnerabilities, and has alerted customers via a security advisory.

"With software vulnerabilities a fact of life in the technology industry, Dell EMC follows best practices in managing and responding to security vulnerabilities in our products. Our goal is to provide customers with timely information, guidance and mitigation to address threats from vulnerabilities," a spokesperson for the company said. "This is a good example of coordinated disclosure in action."

Dell EMC has launched what it describes as an "aggressive counterattack" in the storage space following a year of stagnating channel revenues and an eroding market lead.

The company's "Future Proof Storage Loyalty Programme" includes a new loyalty scheme that provides a three-year money back guarantee for customers purchasing storage products, as well as free software upgrades and free access to Virtustream Storage Cloud.

Alongside these new perks, Dell EMC has also launched two new SC series All-Flash storage products, the SC7020F and the SC5020F, as well as software upgrades for Dell EMC Unity designed to increase efficiency and cost savings for file workloads.

The announcement comes after a year of fierce competition in the storage channel, which has slowly chipped away at Dell EMC's market share and produced disappointing revenues. The company's storage revenue was $3.7 billion for the most recent quarter, essentially flat over last year's totals.

"Let me not be vague... we have not had a great year in terms of storage," said Sarah Shields, Dell EMC UK's VP and general manager for the channel, speaking to Channel Pro. "If you look at the IDC figures, if you look at what's been going on in the market, it's very clear that we have a challenge on our hands in terms of our prominence in the market and some of the up and coming competitors that have been able to take market share from us.

"The challenge is in mid-range storage. What we are absolutely focused on right now is going and fixing mid-range storage."

Dell EMC's performance has been truly lacklustre, as over the past year HPE has managed to nudge the company from the top spot, despite itself having lost market share to smaller storage providers. In 2016, Dell EMC had 25.9% of the storage market tied up, yet a year later this had dwindled to 18.4%, with growth down almost 27%, according to IDC figures.

However, Shields added that the company is now sinking around $4.5 billion each year into research and development and regular software upgrades and migration tools that are included with the hardware are now being offered for free to customers.

Dell's new refund scheme is also committing to a performance increase of at least 4:1 over a three year period, and if the product is unable to deliver, the customer is entitled to a full refund of their investment.

"That's something that nobody is doing," added Shields. "I don't think there's any competitor that has made a statement so bold as to reset the table stakes when it comes to mid-range storage. I make no bones about it. It's an aggressive counter-attack and we'll keep going."

Whether or not this new approach will help turn fortunes around for the company remains to be seen. However, it has clearly been alarmed by the decline and has said it will be investing heavily over the next year to reverse it.

"We've hired a new team of pre-sales engineers, we're investing in storage specialists, security specialists, workplace transformation specialists... we are recruiting like crazy right now to get really good seasoned people with excellent channel experience to go and support our partners," said Shields.

"Are we going to take our eye off storage? Absolutely not. We will maintain our storage position, and we want to get back to number one in the UK. I'm not shying from coming forward with that statement."

Dell EMC has teamed up with Microsoft to offer the company's Azure Stack through channel partners via its Cloud Solution Provider programme.

It will sell the solutions using both direct and indirect channels worldwide, with Microsoft making use of Dell EMC's extensive knowledge of the Azure and hybrid cloud environment and Dell EMC using Microsoft's powerful cloud platform to leverage its reach.

"Dell EMC values the strong collaboration we have had with Microsoft for more than 30 years, which has resulted in world-class, innovative solutions delivered to customers worldwide," Armughan Ahmad, senior vice president and general manager, Hybrid Cloud and Ready Solutions, Dell EMC said.

"The innovations we're announcing today are evidence of how our work with Microsoft has truly changed how our customers conduct their day-to-day activities, enabling them to gain greater value from their IT infrastructures and, more importantly, develop and deliver services to help achieve their ultimate business goals."

Microsoft announced Dell EMC as one of its three hardware vendor partners that will sell the Azure Stack earlier this year, with HP and Lenovo taking up the other two spaces in its network. Dell EMC began selling the hybrid solution directly in May, now opening its Dell EMC Cloud on Microsoft Azure Stack partner product to resellers.

"Customers are adopting cloud-based solutions to drive digital transformation like never before, and we’re thrilled to expand the capabilities for cloud partners under the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider program," Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Group said.

"By joining the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider program, our partners, such as Dell EMC, will deepen customer relationships and expand business opportunities in the cloud."

Dell EMC is to start distributing VMware software through its channel programme from today, allowing certain partners to resell VMware licenses and enterprise license agreements to customers.

The company is initially running the project as a pilot programme with Titanium and Titanium Black partners, starting in the UK and France as well as four other global markets. The programme is set to expand to more regions by the end of the year.

"Feedback from our partners, specifically those that are partners with VMware and with Dell EMC, is that they would like a simpler and more seamless way to deal with Dell EMC, specifically when it comes to VMware," Dell EMC's senior vice president of channel for EMEA, Michael Collins, told Channel Pro.

The new capability is designed to make it easier for partners that are working with customers on projects that employ both Dell EMC infrastructure and VMware services.

"Partners will have a choice," he said. "It's not Dell or another distributor; it's Dell EMC when they choose to, and their traditional distributors when they choose to."

"Obviously, we have been in dialogue with our distributors for some time now," Collins said. "It is true that this is not the most exciting announcement for the distributors, but at the same time I'll tell you it's true that more exciting to them is the future opportunity with Dell EMC."

Alongside Dell EMC Titanium and Titanium Black partners, Dell Technologies Tier One partners and VMWare authorised resellers are also able to resell VMware services. However, only VMware's partners will be able to take advantage of their existing VMware partner programme benefits.

Dell EMC combined each firm's independent channel programmes back in March, following Dell's takeover of EMC.

CSPi has has achieved Dell EMC's Titanium Tier status in the company's Partner Programme, demonstrating its commitment to the company's products via a dedicated Dell EMC practice.

CSPi ticks all the boxes for customers looking for ethernet-based security products, including managed security and IT tech managed services, using Dell EMC's broad portfolio of products and services to cater for individual requirements.

The company's engineers design, integrate and deploy customised solutions for each customer, ensuring their infrastructure is always running in the most efficient way. This could include freeing up resources to make way for innovation, or adding more resources to make sure there are no gaps in service.

"The Dell EMC Partner Program will give CSPi new ways to deliver greater customer value and grow our business," Peter Kaufman, Vice President of Advanced Technologies at CSPi. "As a Titanium Tier partner, we are better prepared to address a wide range of customer challenges, provide more innovative solutions and enable future growth."

Dell EMC unveiled its new tier structure at its Global Partner Summit at Dell EMC World, with the Titanum Tier marking the second highest available status, below black.

When Dell EMC launched the updated programme, the company's president of global channels John Byrne said: "It’s hard to believe it’s only been three short months since our companies came together, and our Global Channels team began the exhilarating work of architecting the Dell EMC Partner Program.

"The Voice of the Partner has been absolutely critical, and we will continue to have 'big ears' and listen closely and constantly to what they need and want from our program."

With the curtain falling on Dell EMC World 2017, it's time to take stock of what exactly this year's show had in store for attendees, and boy howdy, is there a lot to unpack here.

First off, let's get the traditional conference weirdness out of the way. There's usually at least one slightly baffling moment in every enterprise tech show, and this one was no exception. As part of the final keynote, Dell EMC executive Chad Sakac flew in on a stunt rig, dressed as 'Captain Canada', complete with shield and hockey stick.

It's not quite as crazy as the on-stage wedding at last year's Red Hat Summit, but seeing the president of the company's converged platforms business being winched down onto the stage while dressed as a knock-off superhero is definitely going to stay with me for a while.

As the first proper Dell EMC World since the two companies merged last lear, this show is effectively the blueprint for how it means to go on, and it's fair to say that the company brought its A-game. Never has a tech convention been more appropriately named.

For starters, the show itself is gigantic, with reportedly north of 13,000 attendees swamping Las Vegas' Palazzo hotel. Not only that, but the vendor also announced massive product refreshes for virtually all of its data centre products, including a new 14th-generation PowerEdge server, new data protection tools and updates to its entire storage lineup.

The show also cements Dell EMC's position as a fully-unified company. Every member of the company's executive branch was singing from the same song-sheet, with themes of multi-cloud adoption, digital transformation and security innovation being repeated by several separate business units. The company's numerous product likes have been much more closely-integrated too, particularly in the storage and converged spaces.

I've been thinking about this for the past few days, and I genuinely can't think of a single area of enterprise technology that the now-monolithic Dell Technologies doesn't have at least some kind of hand in. From client devices like laptops and tablets all the way down to servers, storage and infrastructure, the company can now cover almost every business IT requirement.

Dell EMC's portfolio is now seriously formidable, and there's a firm argument that the company is now in an excellent position to assume a place as king of the data centre. With such a comprehensive and sophisticated product lineup, can anyone stand against the new world order that is Dell Technologies?