Dell Back Into Blades, Partners with Microsoft for Windows Management

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Dell tried this week to steal the headlines from Sun Microsystems, which is launching its Solaris 10 Unix operating system, by debuting its reentry into the server blade market, with the PowerEdge 1855, and by announcing a partnership with Microsoft that will see the integration of Dell's system management tools with those from Microsoft to create a single management tool for PowerEdge servers.

Dell's PowerEdge 1855 is not the most dense of the blade servers available on the market, but the advent of the machine will allow Dell to get into the blade game. While blade servers are by no means a high volume part of the server market, they are an important sector for the high performance computing market (where density and management are increasingly important) and for the more sophisticated data centers who are struggling with server sprawl and are trying to consolidate their machines down to the fewest number of CPUs as possible.

The PowerEdge 1855 consists of a 7U, rack-mounted chassis that can house up to 10 two-way blade servers that use Intel's "Nocona" 64-bit Xeon DP processors. These processors have 1 MB of L2 cache memory and an 800MHz front side bus, and Dell is supporting them in clock speeds that range from 2.8 GHz to 3.6 GHz. The blades use Intel's 7250 chipset, which supports up to 16 GB of main memory per blade with 4 GB DIMMs and two Ultra320 SCSI disks with capacities ranging from 36 GB to 146 GB. Each blade has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, and has ports to plug in Dell and EMC network storage for shared storage architectures. Dell is partnering with Altiris and Microsoft for systems management software and with Brocade, QLogic, Topspin Communications, Intel, and Marvell for network and storage connectivity peripherals.

With up to 60 blades per standard 42U rack, Dell says that the PowerEdge 1855s will save customers as much as 25 percent on blades compared to buying a similar number of 1U, two-way Xeon servers. The blade approach provides up to 43 percent more performance per square foot than traditional rack-mounted pizza box servers, and due to the network backplane in the blades, customers can cut down on the number of cables for a collection of servers by upwards of 70 percent. Dell also says that the blades can cut down on power consumption versus an equal number of Xeon processors in regular servers by 13 percent.

Dell is charging $2,999 for the PowerEdge 1855 chassis, and a base blade for the box costs $1,699, including a single 2.8 GHz Xeon-64 processor, 512 MB of main memory, and a 36 GB disk. A half-populated chassis will sell for $11,494 and a chassis with ten base blades will cost $19,989. (That means no volume discount, kiddies.)

The PowerEdge 1855 blades will support Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 3 AS and Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 Web, Standard, and Enterprise Editions. Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 was conspicuously absent from the support list, but it seems likely, given the partnership between Dell and Novell that was announced a few weeks ago, that SLES 9 will soon be available for the blades. Solaris 10 will also be an option, and it will be interesting to see what Dell does here.

While the new PowerEdge 1855 blades are not as dense as similar offerings from Hewlett-Packard, IBM, RLX Technologies, and others who have been pushing the commercial blade server density and performance envelope for the past two years, the new Dell boxes are a far cry better than the PowerEdge 1655MC blade servers that marked Dell's initial and rather feeble entry into the market. These machines, which started shipping in December 2002, were comprised of six vertical blade servers, each with a two-way Pentium III server board that is based on Intel's 1.26 GHz Pentium III processors. The PowerEdge 1655MC could pack only six two-way servers into a 3U rack form factor, which was twice the density of a 1U, two-way server, but which was not close to the density that IBM and HP were offering, and which was under-powered (in terms of raw computing power) as it was based on Pentium III rather than Xeon processors.

In a separate announcement, Dell said this week that it has worked with Microsoft to integrate its OpenManage 4 systems management software that it creates for administrators to manage its PowerEdge servers with Microsoft's System Management Server 2003. With this integration, administrators working from SMS can see all of the PowerEdge servers on the network and can see what operating system, firmware, and system software is on the boxes. This is no big deal, since SMS does this for all servers. However, SMS has been integrated with the Dell support site so it can now go get relevant firmware updates for PowerEdge servers and their peripherals, so administrators do not have to leave SMS to update this software separately. The unified Dell-Microsoft tool, which is called SMS 2003 Inventory Tool for Dell Updates, can also schedule the distribution of patches to firmware in the PowerEdge boxes at times when network traffic and demand on the systems is low. The integrated Dell-Microsoft tool will be available in January 2005 and will come free with the purchase of SMS 2003 by Dell customers or through a free download from Microsoft's site.