A very impressive 4U server packed full of goodies
Dell’s new PowerEdge R910 is, like the R810 before it, a rack mount server capable of accommodating four of Intel’s latest Nehalem EX processors.
There, however, the similarities end. The R910 is a far more scalable beast, offering up to double the memory of its smaller sibling plus advanced Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) features, lots more storage and extra expansion options.
Designed to compete head-to-head with RISC based servers from the likes of Oracle and IBM, the PowerEdge R910 is a 4U server, giving Dell plenty of room to play with when it comes to what goes inside.
And, as we soon discovered, it really does make maximum use of that space, stuffing those 4Us full of goodies, starting with the four processor sockets into which go any of Intel’s Xeon 7500 (Nehalem EX) series of multi-core chips.
Processors Dell believes that most customers will buy the R910 with a full complement of processors onboard, as there’s little point doing anything else on this class of server. All the more so given that the processors are likely to account for only a small part of the overall cost, which is something worth thinking about. More on this shortly.
The review system came with four eight-core Xeon X7550 chips installed, located under sizeable heat sinks low down in the bowels of the case. These offer 18MB of L3 cache plus support for Intel’s HyperThreading and Turbo Boost technologies, but there are plenty of others to choose from with differing combinations of cores, clock speeds, cache and HyperThreading support.
Low energy ’L’ processors are also supported, and you can choose cheaper X6500 processors, but only in a two-way setup and we doubt that many buyers will go for this option.
Added to which we’d strongly recommend discussing processor requirements with a Dell expert before buying, as processor choice can have a major impact on application performance. With so many different nuances to take into consideration, this is now almost a specialisation in its own right.
