Dell PowerEdge 2950 III Unboxing

January 21st, 2008 • Related • Filed Under

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We took delivery of a nice new server today. It is a DELL PowerEdge 2950 III, this is a small part of our overall server infrastructure that is going to be driving fav.or.it as it scales up. We have other servers arriving (soon) and I will do an unboxing for them as well and also then reveal our overall strategy.

But for all you serious geeks who like your servers here is a quick run-down of the spec for this one server.

  • 16GB 667MHz (8×2GB Dual Rank DIMM)
  • 2x Quad-Core Xeon E5420 2.5Ghz / 2×6MB 1333FSB
  • 3x 146GB SAS (15,000rpm)
  • Integrated PERC 6/iR Raid Controller
  • Drac 5 Card (Remote assistance card)
  • Dual Power Supply
  • Dual Gigabit Ethernet

(The pictures are taken with my iPhone as I didn’t have anything better to hand so they are not brilliant but you get the idea.)

Dell PowerEdge 2950
Ready to be unpacked…

Dell PowerEdge 2950
Just taken out the tray on top that just contains boring manuals + millions of CD’s for installing Dell related services on top of whatever OS you install (CentOS5 in our case)

Dell PowerEdge 2950
Big shiny box.. but what is inside.

Dell PowerEdge 2950
Wow that is a lot of stuff packed into 2U of space. Cannot really see much from here without lifting stuff up.

Dell PowerEdge 2950
Amazing how much room the powersupplies (dual) take up.

Dell PowerEdge 2950
Room to stuff in a couple more cards, possibly we may add in some extra memory cards for extra memcache action.

Dell PowerEdge 2950
Lots of neat DIMM’s all lined up.. bloody expensive to make these 4GB instead of the 2GB they are.

There Are 7 Responses So Far. »

  1. Comment by Stuart Herbert on 21 January 2008:

    Any particular reason you chose this particular server?

  2. Comment by admin on 21 January 2008:

    Price, price oh and price.. When Dell is desperate to ship equipment you can squeeze out some amazing deals. Spec wise it is pretty damn good for any web related activity, dedicated MySQL most likely tho, but we will be doing some serious benchmarking on this vs our other much bigger servers.

  3. Comment by Nikola on 21 January 2008:

    What was the price, if it’s not any big corporate secret? :)

  4. Comment by Stuart Herbert on 22 January 2008:

    Ta, Nick. I’m looking forward to your benchmarks :) I haven’t played with this generation of Xeon chip. With the older generation, Opterons did better at high sustained load (quad-core Xeon has memory bandwidth problems that Opterons don’t).

    For MySQL, if you can afford it, a Sun Niagara box has the reputation for providing the very best MySQL performance, and last year (before the latest Intel chips were released) at a cheaper price.

  5. Comment by till on 26 January 2008:

    Dell is truely the master of packaging. :D I’ve never seen anything like this. In a single box you could actually fit two boxes. But oh well, at least it’s “save”.

    I just unpacked my R200’s yesterday and put them in the rack. So nice. I am just wondering why the damn rackrails are so fishy? I remember they were much better on the 2950’s. Bottomline, price and service is really awesome with DELL.

  6. Comment by dt on 4 February 2008:

    A price estimate on dell.com for this server is about $ 6,000. A little bit expensive, compared with similar Supermicro servers (where for 3x 3.5″ disks you can buy a 1U server). I hope you bought it at better price :)

    Anyway, I’m waiting for your tests. I suppose it will be a RAID 5 configuration. Will be nice, if you have time, to test hadware raid vs software.

  7. Comment by Tom Sommer on 5 February 2008:

    The R200 rails are a disaster, why they chose to save a few dollars on those is beyond me, especially for a server without hotplug support.

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