Dell touts better blade management

Easier to manage PowerEdge blades using secure digital card and upgraded firmware

Firms using Dell PowerEdge M-Series blade server systems now have a simple way of managing their blades, using software stored on a Secure Digital (SD) card.

The Dell FlexAddress SD card can hold a set of Ethernet MAC addresses and Fibre Channel worldwide names for Dell's blades, giving IT managers the ability to manage network and storage over the whole chassis, rather than just individual blades.

Dell's EMEA public sector enterprise marketing manager Hugh Jenkins said, " FlexAddress can also be used across a range of the multi-vendor, multi-media switches that Dell supports in the M-Series – these include a range of Cisco gigabit and ten gigabit switches, our PowerConnect switch range, and Brocade Fibre Channel switches."

Dell is touting its system as being much cheaper than HP's Virtual Connect system and IBM's Open Fabric Manager, however, whereas FlexAddress can only be used to manage 8 chassis, the HP and IBM packages can both manage 100 chassis.