Upcoming upgrades to our VMware Hyperconverged Infrastructure – New Dell PowerEdge R660 servers!

28 Sep 2023, by Slade Baylis

Here at Micron21 we’ve always prided ourselves on using the latest and greatest hardware that’s available.  We’ve gone above and beyond what’s required with our own data centre – attaining “Tier IV” accreditation - the highest rating possible that a data centre can have for resiliency – you can read more about that here.   So naturally, we also wanted to make sure that we apply these same high standards to the hardware we choose for hosting our client’s systems.  

Through our partnership with Dell and by utilising their enterprise-grade hardware, we’re able to provide some of the most resilient systems available, enabling high-uptime for all the services that we host and protecting our clients’ mission critical services.  In addition, it enables us to provide high-performance infrastructure, allowing our client’s systems to run as quickly as possible and deal with any demands that are thrown at them.

To stay cutting-edge requires a formal hardware lifecycle management plan that involves fading out older hardware generations as they get long in the tooth and don’t perform, as well as introducing newer cutting-edge servers to replace them.  With this in mind, we’re happy to announce that we’ll soon be adding the latest generation Dell PowerEdge R660 servers into our Hyperconverged Infrastructure!

First off, what is Hyperconverged Infrastructure?

When hosting websites, applications, and other systems online, ultimately all of these services are reliant on physical servers that are often located in a data centres.  Outside of a lot of the marketing hype around the “cloud” and the implication that physical hardware is no longer relevant, if the hardware that your systems are running on fail – such as having a faulty RAM module, hard drive, CPU, or motherboard – your systems will stop functioning.

The good news is that there is in fact a way to gain this type of reliability, as this kind of abstraction from the underlying hardware can be achieved through what’s known as Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI).  In short, HCI allows for the abstracting and pooling of the underlying compute and storage resources, which can then be allocated to and used by virtual workloads such as Virtual Machines (VMs) and containers. 

This software abstraction - in addition to the replication of workloads across multiple drives across many physical servers in a cluster (called a vSAN, or Virtual Storage Area Network) - allows for workloads to be protected from downtime caused by hardware failures.  Any single hardware failure, including total loss of a physical host/server, results in those VMs starting up in seconds on another working server!  Not only does this allow for hosting systems to benefit from true cloud-based infrastructure - including the reliability that implies – but it also enables hardware maintenance to occur without downtime.

For those interested, we’ve introduced the concept of hyperconvergence - and the assumed reliability of other “cloud” services - in more detail in our previous Protect your mission critical systems with Hyper-Convergence article.

Now, back on the topic of hardware lifecycle management - one of the other large benefits of hyperconvergence is that it allows for many servers to be added into a cluster together, with their resources pooled together.  With this clustering, older servers are removed from the pool over time as they age, and newer servers are added in as they become available – this allows workloads that require it to benefit from that extra capacity and capability. 

Now the fun part, the details about these new Dell PowerEdge R660 servers!

One of the most exciting parts of the introduction of these new servers is the extra performance they will bring. We use a variety of different servers in our various different systems, but the majority of our VMware cloud servers operate on Dell PowerEdge R640 servers, running “Cascade Lake” architecture CPUs. With the introduction of new Dell PowerEdge R660 servers comes newer “Sapphire Rapids” architecture CPUs, which are between 40% and 60% faster!

These new servers also utilise enterprise NVMe drives, which are some of the fastest drives available today.  These drives allow for blazing fast reads and writes, enabling incredibly high performance for anything that needs to fetch or write large volumes of data from disk quickly.

For those who are interested, here are the more detailed specifications for these new servers:

• Chassis: PowerEdge R660 Server
• Processors: 2 x Intel Xeon Gold 6448Y 2.1G, 32C/64T, 16GT/s, 60M Cache, Turbo, HT (225W) DDR5- 4800
• Memory: 512 GB 4800MT/s Dual Rank
• Storage: 33 TB Enterprise NVMe
• Power: Dual, Hot-plug, Redundant 800W Power Supply

With redesigns to the chassis to allow for better airflow – referred to as its “Smart Flow” chassis – this new server is able to support the highest core count CPUs in air-cooled environments.  That’s no joke – as mentioned above, the new server comes with two CPUs with 32 cores and 64 threads each!  That’s around triple the number of cores and threads supported by earlier hosts! 

By us choosing to utilise Dell, we’re able to also increase the security of our own infrastructure.  At Dell, security is integrated into every phase of their development lifecycle, including protected supply chains and factory-to-site integrity assurance.  As mentioned in our How our partnerships empower our customers article, this is one of the reasons we choose to partner with and utilise Dell hardware, because of the increased protection against counterfeit components, malware, and firmware tampering.

For more information on this new server, here is Dell’s server specifications fact sheet: 

https://i.dell.com/sites/csdocuments/Product_Docs/en/poweredge-r660-spec-sheet.pdf 

Looking to purchase these new servers yourself?

For customers who prefer to run their workloads on their own hardware, we can also help with upgrades to these newer servers.  Whether you’re an existing customer with older hardware that you are wanting to upgrade from, or just looking at getting a server for the first time - we can work with you to purchase this new enterprise-grade hardware!

Have any questions about this or anything else VMware Cloud related?

If you have any questions about this upcoming upgrade to our VMware Cloud systems, or just have some questions about our VMware environments more generally, let us know!

You can email us at sales@micron21.com or give us a call on 1300 769 972 (Option #1).