New Dell Server Designs--

[Scarpozzi]

I had a meeting with Dell on Friday. They were telling me about their 9th gen Power Edge servers to start coming out late this Spring. They've made a lot of advances in their design that I thought I would share.




The most important feature is the introduction of the Dual Core Xeon in their servers and fully buffered memory. They new memory banks will allow reading and writing simultaniously. This is a HUGE advance in performance. In addition to this they're making the switch from PCI-X to PCI-E. They're also doing away with PS2 and using USB, so if you're like me and utilize KVMs and IP KVMs for your racks, you're going to have to go out and buy all new dongles for any incoming boxes.

The 1955 Blade servers are compatible with the 1850 chassis. They've continued to support their old designs to keep them compatible. They're also still supplying you with optional bezels for your servers....they've switched them back to metal.

The 2U's have switched to support 6 SCSI drive bays rather than 5 and the 1U's only support 2 drive bays....some SCSI and some SATA. To me, this is alright unless you wanted to run RAID 5 if you're on a budget and can't afford RAID1....but then you might as well go with the SATA drives if it's a workgroup and not an enterprise level box.

 

[GrammatonJP]

F- that.. thats the biggest bs, ip kvm and kvm are pretty expensive, if it was cheap, I wouldn't mind.

 

[greenmaji]

I would have asked them when they expected to get alienware up on the server production lines

what would be a catchy name for those.. Area 51 blades

 

[Genx87]

Doesnt Dell just rebrand servers?

 

[greenmaji]

naa.. they are a system builder..

 

[evilsaint]

Originally posted by: Scarpozzi
The most important feature is the introduction of the Dual Core Xeon in their servers and fully buffered memory. They new memory banks will allow reading and writing simultaniously. This is a HUGE advance in performance.

Haven't they been using dual-cores for a few product cycles now, or am I just off my rocker?
BTW, nice lookin' Regal ; got a Series II Supercharged in there?

 

[Scarpozzi]

Originally posted by: GrammatonJP
F- that.. thats the biggest bs, ip kvm and kvm are pretty expensive, if it was cheap, I wouldn't mind.

Are you suggesting there's a better way to administer 120 rack-mount servers? I'm confused on why you wouldn't use KVMs... IP KVMs are almost essential if you want to administer 5 racks of servers over a VPN....in fact it makes it nice. The only downside is that if you physically want to reboot a server, you have to rely on DRAC to do it.

 

[Scarpozzi]

Originally posted by: evilsaint

Originally posted by: Scarpozzi
The most important feature is the introduction of the Dual Core Xeon in their servers and fully buffered memory. They new memory banks will allow reading and writing simultaniously. This is a HUGE advance in performance.

Haven't they been using dual-cores for a few product cycles now, or am I just off my rocker?
BTW, nice lookin' Regal ; got a Series II Supercharged in there?

I'm not sure about their 8th gen servers, but I don't think it was an option on the 1650s or 2650s....possibly they offered them last year, but I didn't order any new hardware for my stacks last year. It's just what the Dell rep told me on Friday.

Thanks....not supercharged only the 200HP LS model with the touring pkg. My neighbor was a Buick Dealer and saved me $3k off the sticker price of that one. I think the dealership basically made $500 off the deal to cover their administrative fees and nothing more.

 

[Scarpozzi]

Originally posted by: Genx87
Doesnt Dell just rebrand servers?

They have their own line. They get Broadcom to manufacture most of their motherboards (especially for 2Us) and Dell handles the chassis design in-house for the system. I've never heard of a "rebranded" blade server. That stuff is almost always proprietary because the driver support for the hardware has to be revised so frequently to work with all of the OS vendors.

While I don't always agree with our Dell contract, I would much rather have them around then a lot of the competition....but I'm curious about HP servers and how well they would work in our environment. We just can't get over the contract we have until something really bad happens to change the mind of upper management.

 

[batmanuel]

Seems like a bad time to upgrade the server tech, though. If your company can hold out, it seems like it'd be better to wait for the Woodcrest-based part to hit the market since they are supposed to be 80% faster than a dual core Xeon and consume 35% less power. You don't always have the luxury of waiting for a new arthitecture to hit the streets, but it seems like a waste to buy the current dead-end architecture.

 

[Scarpozzi]

Originally posted by: batmanuel
Seems like a bad time to upgrade the server tech, though. If your company can hold out, it seems like it'd be better to wait for the Woodcrest-based part to hit the market since they are supposed to be 80% faster than a dual core Xeon and consume 35% less power. You don't always have the luxury of waiting for a new arthitecture to hit the streets, but it seems like a waste to buy the current dead-end architecture.

We buy new hardware every year to phase out the old stuff. The oldest servers we have are running Dual P4 1.8Ghz Xeons. If we can upgrade to a 3Ghz Xeon, I'd be happy and won't see much performance increase on the application end. These aren't really high proc utilization boxes except for when our mail servers have to process their batch queues.

 

[WackyDan]

Originally posted by: Genx87
Doesnt Dell just rebrand servers?

For some of their line, yes, like with the Blades which I think are really Fujitsu. The rest of their server family are in house design to the best of my knowledge.