Dell Launches Its First Opteron-Based Servers

Published: October 26, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server and PC maker Dell, smarting from market share declines and competitive pressures among other problems, started to rectify its position in the server market this week by launching its first two Opteron-based PowerEdge servers. Back in May, after a downturn in its financial results, Dell said that it would stop its Intel-exclusive strategy, and this week Dell and alternate chip partner Advanced Micro Devices chose the Oracle OpenWorld event in San Francisco as the stage on which to launch the machines.

Dell's reversal on Opterons puts it in the same position as rivals IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard, which adopted the Opteron processors in that order. It is interesting to note that Brad Anderson, who was the general manager of HP's Industry Standard Server division when it announced in February 2004 that it would put Opterons inside ProLiant servers, is now senior vice president of the Dell Product Group and is spearheading the adoption of Opterons within Dell's products.

Dell was obviously waiting until the "Santa Rosa" Rev F Opterons were in the market in volume before jumping in, which explains in part why Sun was eager to expand its "Galaxy" Sun Fire Opteron server line with the Rev E Opterons this summer, even though the Rev F chips were right around the corner. Sun didn't want to be making an announcement anywhere near Dell, and it has already refreshed the Galaxy machines with the Rev F chips. IBM and HP have similarly rolled out Rev F boxes, and now the big four are going to compete like crazy against each other, peddling both Intel and AMD boxes. The Rev F Opterons support AMD-V, the hardware-assisted virtualization electronics that is important for virtual machine hypervisors, and DDR2 main memory, which is denser and cooler than DDR1 main memory.

The first new Dell Opteron server is the PowerEdge SC1435, which is a two-socket Opteron box that comes in a 1U, rack-mounted form factor. The machine uses the dual-core Opteron 2200 series processors, with speeds ranging from 1.8 GHz to 2.8 GHz. That top-end Opteron part is the Opteron 2220 SE, the same part that Sun used to brag about getting first. It is also a 120-watt chip, which is nothing to brag all that much about when the 2.6 GHz chip runs at 95 watts. The PowerEdge SC1435 uses the Broadcom HT-2100 chipset and the matching HT-1000 I/O controller, and supports up to 32 GB of main memory. The machine has an embedded SATA-II disk controller and has an optional RAID 0/1 controller for SAS drives. The machine supports two 300 GB SAS drives spinning at 10K RPM or two 500 GB SATA-II drives spinning at 7200 RPM. Less dense drives of either type are also supported. The motherboard has dual Gigabit Ethernet ports (implemented by Broadcom chips and including failover support and TCP/IP offloading), and for peripheral expansion, it also has one PCI-Express and one PCI-X slot.

A base PowerEdge SC1435 comes with a 1.8 GHz Opteron 2210 processor (which has two cores), 1 GB of 667 MHz DDR2 main memory, an 80 GB SATA-II disk; it costs $2,037. With two 2.6 GHz Opteron 2218 processors (that's four cores), 16 GB of memory, and two 250 GB SATA-II drives, the SC1435 costs $6,763.

The second Opteron box coming out this week from Dell is the PowerEdge 6950, which is a rack-mounted server that offers four processor sockets and supports the Opteron 8200 series of Rev F chips from AMD. This server is based on the same Broadcom HT-2100 chipset and related HT-1000 I/O controller chips. It can support up to 64 GB of main memory, and has seven PCI-Express expansion slots. The machine does not have an on-board RAID disk controller, but does have a dedicated RAID PCI-Express slot and supports a variety of controllers for SAS disks. Up to five drives are supported, with a maximum of 1.5 TB of internal disk capacity. The PowerEdge 6950 has two embedded Gigabit Ethernet ports (which are the same as those used in the SC1435 server).

A starting configuration of the PowerEdge 6950 server comes with two 2 GHz Opteron 8212 processors (four cores), 2 GB of main memory, a non-RAID SAS disk controller, and a single 36 GB SAS drive; it costs $9,707. Beefing it up to a machine with four dual-core Opteron 8218 processors (eight cores), 32 GB of main memory, a RAID 5 disk controller, and five 146 GB, 15 K RPM disk drives pushes the price up to $24,828.

Dell is supporting Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition, X64 Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, and X64 Enterprise Edition on these two servers. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 AS and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 are also supported on the machines.

Both Opteron-based PowerEdge servers are available now.

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