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PowerEdge 1855 systems exploit Intel Xeon microprocessors.
Two years after launching its first blade server, Dell last week announced a follow-up product: the PowerEdge 1855, a system based on Intel's Xeon microprocessor.
Up to 10 of the dual-processor blades will slide into a new 7U chassis from Dell that has been designed to accommodate 1OG bit/sec Ethernet and the power requirements of Intel's next generation of Xeon processors, which are expected to emerge in 2005.
The dense blade design, which lets systems share common network, power and cooling components, will let users squeeze as many as 62% more servers into their data center racks, when compared with Dell's rack-mounted IU PowerEdge 1850 server, the company says.
Although his company has not yet purchased Dell's new servers, Darrin Hyrup, director of operations with Mythic Entertainment in Fairfax, Va., says the 1855 appears to be powerful enough to be a viable alternative to rack systems. With almost all the space in its data center being used, the company is looking to blades as a way to enhance performance. "This will allow us to expand our services without having to buy a lot more real estate," he says.
Mythic, the creator of the online role-playing game Dark Age of Camelot, expects to standardize on a blade architecture in time for its next major title, Imperator, expected in 2006.
While blades have always taken up less space than rack-mounted servers, the extreme density of the blade architecture has forced some blade designs to use cooler, less powerful processors than did rack systems. However, the 1855 uses the same processor as its IU rack counterpart.
"We were waiting for the technology to mature," Hyrup says. "Until recently we weren't sure we were going to get the performance and space gains we had wanted."
Mythic also is interested in evaluating a low-power version of the 1855, which is expected within a few months, Hyrup says. He adds that he expects the new blade to have significantly lower power requirements than the 1855, which draws approximately 15% less power than the 1850.
One major issue for Dell customers is that the new blade chassis does not yet support switch technology from Cisco, says John Enck, a research vice president at Gartner. Support for this technology is expected in early 2005, but until that time it might make these systems less appealing to enterprise customers, which would have to do more work to integrate the systems into their Cisco environments, he adds. "What you'd pretty much have to do today is cable everything to the blade, which pretty much bypasses one of the major value propositions of blades," Enck says. The PowerEdge 1855 chassis start at $3,000, and blade servers start at $1,700.
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McMillan is a correspondent with the IDG News Service.
Copyright Network World Inc. Nov 22, 2004
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