Thursday, November 06, 2014

DELL FX2 is comming

Michael Dell announced FX2 yesterday at DellWorld 2014.

FX2 is new 2U flexible chassis for sleds. Sleds are basically hardware cartridges having one of three roles listed below
  • flexible server (FC) - FC630, FC430, FC830
  • flexible micro servers (FM) - FM120X4
  • flexible disk enclosures  (FD) - FD332
You can look at FX2 overview video below. It is marketing video however it is nice illustration how revolutionary this platform is.


If you want more deeper FX2 review I would recommend to read  Kevin Houston's blog post "A First Look at Dell’s FX Architecture".

I personally really like this form factor as it is more granular and therefore more flexible then full blade chassis and still allow high density and simplified cable management. You can also use one or two low profile PCIe cards for FX servers. These PCIs cards are accessible from the rear of chassis. Anybody who works with servers for long times probably known that 2U form factor always was and still is the favorite compute form factor in datacenters.

FX2 Chassis leverages DELL PowerEdge FN IO Aggregator which is actually new version of blade DELL PowerEdge M1000e IO Aggregator  redesigned for FX2 form factor.Both these IO Aggregators are based on Force10 technology.


If you ask me I can see lot of nice use cases for this platform including classic VMware vSphere deployments with shared storage, VMware VSAN, EVO:Rail, Nutanix, etc.

What do you think about this hardware platform?
Share your opinions in comments.
And as always any comment is welcome.

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