Dell India’s R&D centre, with its pool of 2,500 engineers, has played a big part in the development of the Dell PowerEdge 13th generation server portfolio, which was launched globally on Tuesday.

The Bangalore Design Centre, which has over 1,000 engineers, contributed 60 per cent to overall server systems management software and 100 per cent on validation engineering and product documentation.

Speaking to BusinessLine , Rudramuni B, Executive Director & Head, R&D, Dell India, said: “We worked on three basics: enhancing applications performance, simplifying systems management and workload management.” One of the key innovations by the team is a Near Field Communication (NFC) server management solution that uses mobile devices to manage, monitor and set up servers.

“Data centre managers can use a smartphone or a tablet to tap into the server and get to know the entire health of the server. It also enables administrators to monitor and manage their data centre environments anytime, anywhere with their mobile device,” said Rudramuni.

Patent surge With over 120 patents, Dell India R&D has stepped up the pace of innovation and IP creation, from producing 1-2 patents a year five years ago to 15-20 patents every year. Founded in 2001, the Dell India R&D centre has grown from a remote pool of engineers who provided support and sustenance work in software development and testing to the company’s second largest product development centre globally.

Last year, Janardhanan Pathangi, then Director, CTO Networking, was recognised as Dell Inventor of the year 2013 – a first for Dell India R&D.

The new Dell PowerEdge servers have been built with the latest Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 product family.

Customer feedback Designed to help customers address and optimise application and workload requirements, the new range of servers has factored in feedback elicited from 800 customers across 22 countries.

“We wanted to understand what customers want from us and got them to configure servers based on their own wishlists. We then took their server configurations to our engineering team and asked them to develop a product that customers want,” said Manish Gupta, Director, Enterprise Solutions Group, Dell India.

Ninety per cent of Dell’s global customers and 98 per cent of its India customers said they were struggling with data centre management, claimed Gupta.

“We addressed this problem by simplifying the entire deployment, monitoring and management of servers, thereby bringing costs down for customers, helping them deploy servers at 10 times the earlier pace and making them compatible with the older generation of servers.”

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