Reference Architecture

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local configuration), six hot-pluggable/redundant power supplies, and nine hot-pluggable N+1
redundant fan modules.
Blade Servers: The PowerEdge M620 blade server is the Dell 12
th
generation PowerEdge half height
blade server offering:
 New high-efficiency Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 family processors for more advanced processing
performance, memory, and I/O bandwidth.
 Greater memory density than any previous PowerEdge server. Each PowerEdge M620 can deploy
up to 24x 32GB DIMMs, or 768GB of RAM per blade – 12TB of RAM in a single M1000e chassis.
 ‗Agent Free‘ management with the new iDRAC7 with Lifecycle Controller allows customers to
deploy, update, maintain, and monitor their systems throughout the system lifecycle without a
software management agent, regardless of the operating system.
 The PowerEdge Select Network Adapter (formerly NDC) on the PowerEdge M620 offers three
modular choices for embedded fabric capability. With 10Gb CNA offerings from Broadcom,
QLogic & Intel, our customers can choose the networking vendor and technology that‘s right for
them and their applications, and even change in the future as those needs evolve over time.
The Broadcom and QLogic offerings offer Switch Independent Partitioning technology,
developed in partnership with Dell, which allows for virtual partitioning of the 10Gb ports.
I/O Modules: The Dell blade chassis has three separate fabrics referred to as A, B, and C. Each fabric
can have two I/O modules, for a total of six I/O module slots in the chassis. The I/O modules are A1,
A2, B1, B2, C1, and C2. Each I/O module can be an Ethernet physical switch, an Ethernet pass-through
module, FC switch, or FC pass-through module. InfiniBand™ switch modules are also supported. Each
half-height blade server has a dual-port network daughter card (NDC) and two optional dual-port
mezzanine I/O cards. The NDC connects to Fabric A. One mezzanine I/O card attaches to Fabric B, with
the remaining mezzanine I/O card attached to Fabric C.
Chassis Management: The Dell PowerEdge M1000e has integrated management through a redundant
Chassis Management Controller (CMC) module for enclosure management and integrated Keyboard,
Video, and Mouse (iKVM) modules. Through the CMC, the enclosure supports FlexAddress Plus
technology, which enables the blade enclosure to lock the World Wide Names (WWN) of the FC
controllers and Media Access Control (MAC) addresses of the Ethernet controllers to specific blade
slots. This enables seamless swapping or upgrading of blade servers without affecting the LAN or SAN
configuration.
Embedded Management with Dell’s Lifecycle Controller: The Lifecycle Controller is the engine for
advanced embedded management and is delivered as part of iDRAC Enterprise in 12th-generation Dell
PowerEdge blade servers. It includes 1GB of managed and persistent storage that embeds systems
management features directly on the server, thus eliminating the media-based delivery of system
management tools and utilities previously needed for systems management. Embedded management
includes:
 Unified Server Configurator (USC) aims at local 1-to-1 deployment via a graphical user interface
(GUI) for operating system install, updates, configuration, and for performing diagnostics on
single, local servers. This eliminates the need for multiple option ROMs for hardware
configuration.