Dell today announced a range of new servers built using the latest Intel Nehalem EX processors. The new Intel chips, called the Xeon 7500, add a range of features that boost performance and reliability.

Dell’s David Ard told The Hypervisor the new chips are at the heart of a new range of PowerEdge servers that accommodate huge amounts of RAM and many processor cores, making them a great platform for hypervisors and virtual machines, and also for high performance computing (HPC).

Fleshing out the existing PowerEdge range, which includes the R410 and R610, the new PowerEdge R810 is a four socket 2U rack mountable system with 32 DIMM slots, giving it a maximum RAM capacity of 512GB using currently available RAM. The maximum capacity would double to 1TB when 32GB DIMMS become ready available later this year.

Ard said the Xeon 7500 includes 20 new features to improve reliability, such as the ability to handle errors in RAM chips that would cause “blue screen” crashes in x86 servers fitted with other CPUs.

Dell also launched its new FlexMem Bridge, which enables four socket servers fitted with two CPUs to have the same maximum RAM configuration as those fitted with four CPUs. Without this option, a two PCU version of the R810 could be configured with only half the RAM as a four CPUconfiguration.

Ard was also bullish about Dell’s ability to deliver the new servers to customers immediately. He said some Dell customers were already evaluating the new hardware, and Dell would be taking and fulfilling orders from today.