Monday, October 23

Dell AMD Opteron servers

We've known about this for quite some time, I think I heard the first rumors last November and we saw new AMD desktop machines from Dell about a month ago.
And now we have to new shiny Opteron Socket-F machines. They all run Linux of course.

First the anticipated Dell PowerEdge SC1435. A nice little box, as I've said before, the rack mounts in the SC series just get things done. I do think the price tag at around $3000 USD is a bit high. That'll probably drop quite a lot if you haggle with Dell and buy them in bulk. It is a perfect JBoss server, deployed in a nice farm of course, or it would make a very nice HPC node.
Now if just Dell would send me a few of these to test, they could use a bit of blogger hype. :)

The second new box looks even more interesting,
the Dell PowerEdge 6950.
A four socket machine with up to 8 cores and 64 Gigs of memory. On par with the HP DL585 and sort of a "half size" machine compared to the Sun X4600. I wonder which box packs the best bang for buck, but thats for another post. But a similar speced X4600 cost about twice as much, but on the other hand you get the extra scalability and future proof CPU cards instead of on-board socket-f.
The PE 6950 takes 5 internal SAS disks and has got 7 (free) PCIe slots.
Thats quite a lot of I/O for more NIC's and HBA's, do I dare to say this makes a very nice RAC node. Probably one of the top players in the area, team it up with a decent SAN and you are in business.
Starting price is not bad, not bad at all. An entry-level machine comes in at around $10000 USD.
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See the product videos over at direct2dell.

Enjoy.

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