Modular, tool-free, and easy-to-assemble. This Is My overall impression of the Dell PowerEdge servers that have visited the lab.
The lab has received a lot of Dell servers, from 2U mainstream racks PowerEdge 2950, R805, R710, to four-way AMD platform R905, even more complicated chunk Head Blade chassis M1000e and new R810 are available. Although the positioning, structure, and configuration of these products are different, they are a bit common and worthy of praise, it is a "exquisite" modular design.
Why is this adjective used? A server with a huge and rigid shape seems to be stuck with the word anyway. However, when you try to remove a big guy who consists of dozens of parts, without using tools-or even a simple screwdriver, however, after quickly assembling it like building blocks, you must be able to understand the word "exquisite.
These designs seem to have no direct relationship with the server's performance. However, they do not make server disassembly, maintenance, upgrade, and other operations annoying, and it can make these operations faster-the Administrator does not have to study the tools to use, or worry that the replacement of components takes too long, even if the chassis is opened for the first time, according to the illustration of the chassis backplane, it can also be completed in dozens of seconds to several minutes, which sounds really good.
Fully modular Dell PowerEdge R810
From the picture, this Dell PowerEdge R810 seems nothing special. The common 2U rack design, while the front panel protective cover is also like the Zorro mask. Although R810 is not so rigid, it also masks most of the Front Panel details. However, the so-called "Qian Kun", when opening the front panel and the chassis cover, R810 in the design of unique value, in order to see everything at a glance.
When talking about Dell R810, We have to first introduce Intel's multi-channel new platform Xeon 7500. In March this year, Intel launched the "Nehalem-EX" Xeon 7500 multi-channel new platform. Intel Xeon 7500 is one of the most important products this year and even in recent years. The Xeon 7500 with the Nehalem microarchitecture has some new features to show off: for example, the QuickPath interconnection architecture, four QPI buses up to 6.4GT/s, and four-channel DDR3 memory controllers are integrated, this improves memory and I/O bandwidth as never before.
Xeon 7500 was once hailed as "the most powerful x86 processor in history". It is no longer satisfied with the x86 market, but looks at the more high-end server of the world's round-robin machine market. In this regard, Xeon 7500 has two capitals, high scalability and the RAS features transplanted from the anteng platform. In terms of scalability, each Xeon 7500 processor can support 16 cores, so the four-way system memory can support 1 TB, and Xeon 7500 can be extended to eight systems without passing through the node controller. In addition, Xeon 7500 introduced the RAS feature transplanted from the anteng platform, so that the application scope can be extended to key task fields.
After the launch of the Xeon 7500 platform, Dell released a new Xeon 7500-based product, including 2U four-way R810, 4U four-way R910, and M910 blade servers. Among them, Dell R910 is a four-way server with the highest scalability, with excellent reliability and performance. Dell M910 is a new generation of four-way blade with the highest computing density; the Dell R810 can be said to be a "compromise" solution between the two. The 2U four-way design gives R810 a high computing density and combines scalability, it has 32 memory slots and 4 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, which are especially suitable for virtualization applications.