White Papers

Direct from
Development
PowerEdge Product Group
PowerEdge MX-Series Optimizations for the
Software Defined Data Center
Technical Note by:
Andrew Hawthorn
Todd Mottershead
SUMMARY
The Software Defined Data Center
is emerging as one of the leading
architectural approaches for
customers who wish to cut costs,
increase agility and improve
reliability without incurring vendor
lock-in.
The new MX-Series Modular
solutions from Dell EMC were
designed specifically to enable
SDDC by integrating key
optimizations for Software Defined
Storage and Software Defined
Networking with the industry
leading Dell EMC PowerEdge
Server family.
MX SDS Capacity Enhancements
A key element of SDS optimization is capacity. Unlike other 2 socket
blade solutions on the market, the Dell EMC PowerEdge MX740c
offers up to 8 drives including 6 front-mount hot pluggable 2.5” drives
and 2 internal SSD’s installed on the optional Boot Optimized Storage
System (BOSS) controller.
Background
The term Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) defines the extension of
virtualization to all data center resources. According to Wikipedia, an SDDC
virtualizes “all elements of the infrastructure – networking, storage, CPU and
security and delivers them as a service.” The benefits include reduced acquisition
cost, reduced operating cost, increased levels of automation with each component
potentially provisioned, operated and managed through an application
programming interface (API).
Most customers have started the journey towards SDDC with the implementation
of server based hypervisors like VMWare, Hyper-V and KVM for the compute layer
and many have extended this concept to storage with Software Defined Storage
(SDS) solutions. For these customers, the next stage in the journey will often be
the virtualization of Network Services (SDN). The Dell EMC MX-Series has been
designed specifically to assist customers with this journey.
MX Optimizations for SDS
Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions aggregate disk storage local to each
server into a highly reliable, extremely scalable, high performance storage pool
that is easy to deploy and manage. This approach costs less, performs better and
has helped many customers reduce the time it takes to deploy new solutions but
has historically been a poor fit for blade environments due to their low disk counts.
The complexity of managing large numbers of servers led to the development of
blade systems where multiple servers could be enclosed and managed from a
single chassis. The challenge for many customers as they evolve to SDS based
storage is that these systems were designed for the SAN based storage
technologies available and simply do not offer the local disk capacities necessary
for SDS.
With drive subsystems optimized primarily for boot functions, most blade designs
offer only 2 drives. In designing the MX-Series, Dell EMC Engineers took the
opportunity to rethink the entire architecture and to design a solution that not only
exceeds the management efficiencies of existing blade solutions but adds in key
design elements that make it an ideal solution for SDS environments.