Review: Dell PowerEdge R900 server

Although originally launched this February in the Philippines, Dell's R900 PowerEdge was upgraded with Intel Dunnington series six-core processors in October.

The PowerEdge R900 is a rack mount 4U system, which has four processor sockets and can have a maximum of 256GB of system memory. Our system had 16Gb of 667MHz memory installed, and three 2.5in form factor serial attached SCSI (SAS) 10,000 rpm, 146GB hard drives configured as a single virtual disk SCSI device.

There are drive bays for up to eight 2.5in drives, but users can specify a backplane for up to five 3.5in drives.

Our R900 had a full complement of four Intel 2.66GHz Xeon E7650 series six-core processors installed, running with a 1066MHz front side bus. These 45nm, 1.9 billion transistor, Penryn-based CPUs do not have HyperThreading technology, which a quick check in the Windows task manager performance tab shows - we could see 24 processors.

Firing up the system brings a sound like an aircraft taking off but, since the server will reside in a dedicated room or datacentre, ear defenders won't be needed.

Our review system had Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition installed, but all editions are supported, as are Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5, Sun Solaris 10, Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 and Windows Server 2003 R2.

Virtualisation software offered with the R900 includes Hyper-V. Off-the-shelf systems come with either VMware's ESXi 3.5 or Citrix's XenServer 4.1 installed, and Dell's embedded hypervisor also supports Sun Solaris on the x86 platform. Virtualisation software supported on the R900 includes Citrix XenServer, VMware's Infrastructure 3.5 and VMware's ESXi 3.5.

It was simple to enable the Hyper V Microsoft Management Console snap-in, but the R900 had to be fully patched using Windows Update before this was possible. Using Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualisation system was simple and, although its management GUI seemed fairly intuitive, Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, which we installed later, appeared less so.

Space taken up by the 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition was 24.8GB out of a total capacity of 383GB. As a comparison the 32-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 occupies a similar amount of disk space at just under 24GB.

We attached the system to our itweeknet.com domain and imaged the system. After enabling the WS 2008 backup and restore feature, the compressed image used just under 9GB of disk space, and restoring the system to its original image was trivial.

We also installed version 5.4 of Dell's browser-based server management toolkit, OpenManage Server Administrator, which we downloaded from Dell's web site, but would normally come on CD. Installation was quick and simple and we could log on locally or remotely through a browser using our domain password to manage or check various system and subsystem status. Linux, NetWare and Windows systems are also supported.

With OpenManage, we could review server status and inventory information, as well as configure BIOS settings or update system firmware. As well as system diagnostics, OpenManage can be set up to alert administrators if various failures occur, for example in hardware components like system memory.

An alert can be configured to appear on the admin console itself or be broadcast across firms' networks, or trigger an application to be executed. Most subsystems are covered by this alerting feature, although we couldn't see one for the network or storage subsystems.

To get some idea of the processor power, we ran a standard benchmark on the R900 system. Firstly the 64-bit version of Cinebench R10 gave a CPU benchmark for rendering using one CPU of 3289. When all the four CPUs were used, the score went up to 30,916.

As a check, we compared these results with data from our sister publication Personal Computer World, which benchmarked Intel's Core i7 processor. This CPU uses Intel's Nehalem which dispenses with the FSB system for data and address transfers, and uses an on-chip memory controller technology Intel has called QuickPath Interconnect which competes with AMD's HyperTransport technology.

A Core i7 processor uses dual hyper-threading, giving a theoretical processor count of eight, while Dunnington has six physical processors and no hyper-threading.

The Core i7 920 running at 2.66GHz recorded a Cinebench R10 score of 3079 using one processor and 13117 when all four cores were enabled. The Core i7 940 processor running at 2.93GHz gave scores of 3621 and 14,936 respectively, while the 965 Extreme model running at 3.2GHz gave a score of 3698, and with all cores enabled registered 16202.

However, the best indication of performance by a system such as this designed to run enterprise virtualisation workloads, with high end databases and hefty enterprise resource planning systems, would be a benchmark designed to review its performance when running many virtual machines.

Network connectivity was provided courtesy of a Broadcom BCM5708C NetXtreme II gigabit Ethernet card. The only very minor niggle in our opinion was the lack of a network interface card (NIC) which can be 'virtualised'.

With virtualisation of operating systems and storage being commonplace on server systems nowadays, virtualising elements like firewalls and NICs should help to relieve I/O contention at the network level.

Although Dell has 10 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) cards supported, one of Neterion's 10GbE X3100 Series adapters installed would allow better virtual machine performance over high capacity networks.

Opening up the easily accessible internals of the R900 showed a neat compartmentalisation of the subsystems. At the rear besides the NIC are serial, VGA and two USB ports, while on the front are two USB ports and another VGA port. Screen output uses an integrated ATI Radeon ES1000 with 32MB of onboard memory.

Pricing for the upgraded R900 starts at £6,573 + VAT, but our system as configured would cost around $32,500 (£21,500), according to the online price configuration tool on Dell's web site.