Dell strives to make it easier to be green with FlexAddress

In the scheme of green things, Dell's PowerEdge M-Series blades could be described as emerald. Now, the company is trying to make it easier for data center managers to opt for them, with a new patent-pending tool called Dell FlexAddress.

Glenn Keels, director, global relationship marketing at Dell, describes FlexAddress as a simple way for managers to deploy and manage blades because it abstracts that Fibre Channel Worldwide Network Name and Ethernet/iSCSI Media Access Control address from the blade hardware and instead ties persistently to a slot in M1000e blade chassis. It works in conjunction with the PowerEdge M1000e Chassis Management Controller. So, essentially, FlexAddress is meant to speed network configuration and management by virtualizing the switches across up to eight chassis (or up to 128 blade servers). Dell's networking allies in the data center are Cisco and Brocade, and the technology integrates with equipment from both vendors.

Rick Becker, vice president of software and solutions for the Dell Product Group, says FlexAddress makes it easier for data center to upgrade or make planned (unplanned) changes to their data center. He stresses flexibility and simplicity as FlexAddress's key differentiator. It also doesn't hurt that it costs $499, which is substantially less than comparative tools from other server vendors, he says. "This is an insurance policy against downtime," Becker says.