Dell Revamps PowerEdge Server Line with Penryn Xeons

Published: November 13, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It was Dell's turn to get the first jump on the new processors from Intel yesterday as the latter company announced its dual-core and quad-core "Penryn" 45 nanometer family of Xeon processors for two-socket servers. Dell also announced a new four-socket box that employs Intel's relatively new quad-core "Tigerton" Xeon 7300 processors, which are like the Penryns based on the Core architecture, and a single-socket box aimed at stingy customers with modest computing needs.

The PowerEdge R900 is the fastest server Dell has ever shipped, and it is also the first lead-free machine that the company has brought to market, according to Daniel Bounds, senior manager of PowerEdge servers. The R900 is a rack-mounted machine that can support up to four Xeon 7300 quad-core processors and from 1 GB to 128 GB of main memory. The server supports 10K RPM and 15K RPM SAS disk drives, in either 2.5-inch (maximum of eight) or 3.5-inch (maximum of six) form factors. The R900 has four x8 and three x4 PCI Express peripheral slots. Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition, Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 4.5 and 5.0, and Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 are all certified and prebundled on the machine; so is VMware's ESX Server 3.0.2 hypervisor, for customers who want to go virtual with that hypervisor. (RHEL 5 and SLES 10 have Xen hypervisors integrated inside of them.)

Another new box is the PowerEdge R200, which is a 1U rack-mounted server with a single socket that supports a wide variety of processors, from the Celeron processors running at up to 2 GHz to dual-core Pentium, Core 2 Duo, and Xeon 3000 processors, to quad-core Xeon 3200 series chips (these were code-named "Kentsfield" and are a companion to the "Clovertown" Xeon 5300s available in two-socket servers). The R200 supports from 512 MB to 8 GB of main memory, and has two disk bays that take 3.5-inch SAS or SATA drives. Intel has not yet shipped a single-socket variant of the Penryn chips, but will do so in the first quarter of 2008, and you can bet that the R200 will be updated to support these then. In the meantime, this new R200 box runs Windows Server 2003 (including the Web and Small Business Server editions), RHEL 4.5 and 5.0, and SLES 10.

Dell is dropping the Penryn Xeon 5200 (dual-core) and Xeon 5400 (quad-core) processors into the existing PowerEdge 2950 III, 2900 III, and 1950 III servers, all of which provide two processor sockets. The PowerEdge 2950 is a 2U rack server that will get the new "R" rebranding when "Nehalem" processors and a new processor design support them come out next year, according to Bounds. The PowerEdge 2950 III supports up to 32 GB of FB-DIMM main memory, six PCI Express and four PCI-X slots, and six 3.5-inch SATA disks. The PowerEdge 2900 III is a 5U tower/rack variant of the same system that has 10 drive bays. Both machines run the same mix of Windows and Linux and also support Novell's NetWare operating system. The PowerEdge 1950 III server is a 1U rack box that supports up to 32 GB of memory, two 3.5-inch SATA disks, and two PCI Express or PCI-X slots on a riser that comes off the motherboard.

Dell's announcements were not just concerning Intel chips. The company also launched the T105 entry tower server, which is based on AMD's Sempron or Opteron 1000 single-socket processors. This tower server supports from 512 MB to 8 GB of DDR main memory, and comes with three PCI Express and one PCI-X slot and two drive bays that support either SAS or SATA disks.

Dell plans to ship all of these new servers by the end of November. Pricing was not available, since they are not yet shipping.

Bounds said that Dell will be making EnergySmart variants of these servers available as well, which offer higher energy efficiency than regular PowerEdge servers. Dell has been able to push the efficiency of the power supplies used in the boxes up to 90 percent, and with the combination of low-voltage processors and slower memory, Bounds claims that Dell can deliver between 10 and 15 percent better performance per watt than either IBM or Hewlett-Packard can do in their respective System x and ProLiant server lines.

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