Dell PowerEdge SC1425 review

Since I never can find a review of servers before I buy them I thought it was my responsibility to do one myself.

Introduction
The SC1425 is thought to be a HPC-node or similar where more than one box is used. It gives good performance at a good price. But provides close to no redundancy, dual drives is about it. We will use our boxes as load balanced application servers where it doesn't really matter if one box fail as long as it is repaired in a reasonable time.
Starting price point in the UK is £339, the review spec. lists at £880.



Specs for my review box:

Dell PowerEdge SC1425

Singel Intel Xeon 3.2GHz

2Gb DDR2 ECC memory (4x512Mb modules)

2x 80Gb 7200rpm SATA drives

Dual port Intel Pro1000 Gigabit Ethernet

Intel SATA controller

Single PSU

1U rack-mount kit

No CD, no DVD, no floppy (Yes! the way I want it!)

See the Dell website for full specs.

Installation
Rack mounted in 4 minutes, nice snap-in rails.
I wrote a quick kickstart script for CentOS 4.
The PXE prompt appeared as it should I after entering my kickstart file and pressing enter twice it took about 30 minutes and voilaia, I had a clean login prompt and a pre-configured system. Quite lengthy install you might think but keep in mind that I did not have a hardware RAID controller in the box (£135 extra option) so I opted to build software-raid MD devices during the install so just syncing them took an extra 15 minutes.
Clean and simple, no hickups. All the hardware was supported, no problems with anything so far. [dmesg].
Logged in thru SSH and did a yum -y upgrade to get the latest kernel etc, nice 180Mb download. *sigh*
.

Management
During the startup I had seen a cool IPMI prompt flash by so I just had to reboot and check it out. The IPMI/BMC interface will give you some very basic remote managemepossibilitiestes outside the OS level. Like power cycle the machine or check sensor temperatures. Keep in mind you need a Dell patched ipmitool for use with Dell servers (bastards). Configured an IP for the IPMI card (which actually uses eth0 as it's mgmt interface) and set it to our mgmt vlan (yes, had to tag the port in the switch as well). Easy enough. All worked straight out. I could not find an option to switch on or off the gimp light.
The IPMI facility does not compare to the LOM cards in Sun boxes or the addon RAC cards from Dell, no remote console etc. But it does the trick to power cycle a frozen server. Totally acceptable for the price.


Performance
The SC1425 is very fast for the price, chipset is alright and I guess the only performance draw back is expected. The onboard SATA controller and software-raid.
CPU crunching and memory access is quite good.
During a the pgbench runs I got about 20% iowait which is far from good. But fixing this adds another £250 to the box price (PERC + SCSI drives).

PGBENCH results.

[root@ron1 pgbench]# ./pgbench -t 50 -c 50
starting vacuum...end.
transaction type: TPC-B (sort of)
scaling factor: 1
number of clients: 50
number of transactions per client: 50
number of transactions actually processed: 2500/2500
tps = 149.314233 (including connections establishing)
tps = 150.790507 (excluding connections establishing)
[root@ron1 pgbench]# ./pgbench -t 50 -c 100
starting vacuum...end.
transaction type: TPC-B (sort of)
scaling factor: 1
number of clients: 100
number of transactions per client: 50
number of transactions actually processed: 5000/5000
tps = 139.651475 (including connections establishing)
tps = 140.947096 (excluding connections establishing)

Compiling PostGRES 8.0.3

time make -j3 
real    1m58.274s
user    3m22.002s
sys     0m13.220s

Conclusion
My full impression of the Dell PowerEdge SC1425 is quite good. Price wise it is really good, performance is good and redundancy is as expected. I would never recommend someone to use this machine as a database server or office file server. It should purely to be used in farms of two or more boxes. Web servers, Citrix servers, application nodes or pure HPC.
They could have added a few more remote management features.

More pictures










* Note, all picture are taken with a Ericsson K750i mobile phone, quite good phone I must say. Thanks John.

PS
The SC1425 is known to work flawlessly under Solaris 10 so if I manage to get some time I will try to install it and check it out.