Dell Broadens Single-Socket Entry X64 Server Lineup

Published: March 27, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server maker Dell continues to build out its entry server line as it tries to expand its sales through reseller channels, which tend to cater to the small and medium businesses who buy relatively modestly powered servers, but which also want the kind of features today that would be found in more expensive midrange gear in years gone by. Strengthening the entry product line is a key factor in Dell's server expansion, and like everyone else in the X64 server racket, Dell wants to make it up in volume.

Leading that effort since last year is Sally Stevens, director of server product management at Dell, which has needed some help in getting its server act together. Stevens was previously director of commercial platform solutions at X64 chip maker Advanced Micro Devices, and spent a decade at the combined Hewlett-Packard/Compaq, significantly as director of ProLiant marketing and director of strategy and business planning, where she launched the "QuickBlade" blade server product line at Compaq that we today know as the BladeSystem. She spent a decade before her time at Compaq and HP at various management and engineering roles at NCR.

Last November, Dell started revamping its entry server line with the new "Penryn" family of quad-core processors from Intel, and the two new machines that Dell launched yesterday expand upon those offerings. The variety of single-socket machines that Dell has put together also lends credence to a theory many of us advanced before dual-core--much less quad-core--processors came to market years ago, which stipulated that while some customers could take on the extra cores and would continue to buy every-larger machines, there are other customers who have fairly modest workloads that do not expand at a fast rate and they would downshift their form factors as more cores, memory, and I/O were packed into smaller boxes. In plain English, while a two-socket Xeon DP server might have been a workhorse server for a SMB client in 2005, in 2008, a single-socket box with two or four cores in it would be more than enough of a draft animal for a lot of shops. That is why these new machines have hot plug disks and redundant power supplies, just to cite two features.

The new PowerEdge R300 rack-mounted and T300 tower servers are based on Intel's 5100 chipset, and both support a mix of processors, including Intel's Celeron, Core 2 Duo, Xeon 3000, and Xeon 5000 series of chips. The chipset used in boxes supports a 1.3 GHz front side bus, and the motherboard for the machines has six DDR2 DIMMs that span up to 24 GB of maximum main memory using 4 GB DIMMs (compared to the typical 8 GB maximum in entry servers these days).

The T300 tower server has room for four 3.5-inch SAS or SATA disk drives, plus two more drive bays for other peripherals; the motherboard has an integrated SATA disk controller and a variety of RAID controllers are available for plugging into I/O slots in the machine as well. The T300 has two PCI-Express x8 slots, two PCI-Express x4 slots, and one PCI-X slots, and two Gigabit Ethernet ports. The T300 will soon support Dell's DRAC5 service processor. The base T300 server comes with a 1.86 GHz Celeron, 512 MB of main memory, a 160 GB disk drive, and a 16X DVD drive for $999 without an operating system; Dell is offering a $300 instant savings discount off its Web store yesterday, which drops the price to $699. A reasonably configured machine--with a quad-core X3363 chip running at 2.83 GHz, 8 GB of memory (and lots of empty memory slots for expansion), four hot-plug 73 GB SAS drives and a RAID 6 SAS controller--costs $4,661 and is available online now for $3,260 after a $1,401 instant rebate.

The rack-mounted version of the new server, the R300, has room for two hot-plug SAS or SATA disks and has two PCI-Express x8 slots and the two Gigabit Ethernet ports, all poured into a 1U rack form factor. The base R300 comes with a 1.8 GHz Celeron processor, 512 MB of main memory, and a 160 GB disk drive for $1,249 with an online instant discount of $375, bringing the cost down to $874. With the low-power, quad-core Xeon L5140 processor running at 2.33 GHz, 8 GB of memory, and four 73 GB disks with a mirrored configuration costs $3,264, and with a $981 instant discount online costs $2,283 now.

Both machines support Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 R2 (including Small Business Server, Standard, and Web editions), Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, and Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 4.5 AS and ES editions.

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