Dell PowerEdge R815 review

The high volume four-socket (4P) rack server space is without doubt the sweet spot for AMD’s latest Opteron 6100 processors, and Dell takes the honours for delivering the very first example – the PowerEdge R815.

As we observed in last month’s low-down on the Opteron 6100 series, AMD has removed the price barrier to 4P computing. For less than £8,500 exc VAT, the R815 comes with a quartet of 12-core Opterons in a 2U form factor, which equates to a processing density of 1,008 cores per 42U rack cabinet.

The R815 shares the same behavioural design concept offered by all the latest PowerEdge servers. The use of many similar components means that if support staff know how to service one PowerEdge server then most components should be easily recognisable on all other models.

In fact, this server takes many features from the higher-end Dell PowerEdge R810, which supports Intel’s Xeon 6500 and 7500 processors. It comprises the same 2U rack chassis where the front panel is split into two sections horizontally, with the lower half providing clear airflow
through the chassis.

You have six hot-swap SFF disk bays in the upper half of the front panel and Dell offers a choice of SATA, SAS and SSD drives. The review system looks even better value, since it includes five 147GB 6Gbits/sec SAS SFF hard disks, plus Dell’s PERC H700 RAID card.

The front panel also sports an LCD panel, which turns from blue to orange when problems are detected. Along with viewing power usage and temperatures, you can use its keypad to scroll through error logs to see which component caused the alert.

Power redundancy is also on the cards. The review system includes both 1,023W hot-plug supplies, which delivered the goods in our power tests. The Opteron 6174 processors have a low rating of 80W and our inline meter recorded 335W with Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise in idle. With all cores pushed to the limit by SiSoft Sandra, we saw this peak at 618W.

AMD has the edge over Intel’s 6500 and 7500 Xeons in terms of power, as an R810 with a pair of 2GHz X6550 Xeons and twice the memory pulled 392W in idle and 558W under peak load. Considering the R810 had 16 physical cores as opposed to 48 in the R815, the benefits of the Opteron are clear.

For virtualisation duties, the R815 sports Dell’s unique internal SD memory card controller, and you get not one but two internal SD cards for booting into a hypervisor. The controller keeps an onboard copy of the boot media in case it fails and the process is fully automated. We tested this by removing and reinserting the second card and saw the boot-up process resynchronise its contents with the primary card.

The R815 sports Dell’s Lifecycle Controller and its 1GB of NVRAM memory. This comes into its own for OS installation: we were able to boot the server into Dell’s UEFI environment and deploy an OS without needing to use any boot media. Along with a deployment wizard, the Dell controller also provides diagnostics and server update tools.

The iDRAC6 Enterprise management controller in the review system provides a dedicated network port and full remote access to the server. Dell also includes its Management Console software, which provides automated discovery of all SNMP devices, inventory and system monitoring.

The R815 offers a tool-free internal design for easy upgrades and maintenance. The motherboard has four banks of DIMM sockets, and the front pair are accessed by releasing the hard disk bay and sliding it forward.

Cooling is handled by a row of six hot-swap fans in the centre of the chassis, and the entire assembly can be removed after releasing clamps on each side. During testing, we also found the R815 to be commendably quiet.

Expansion potential is very good. The server offers six PCI Express slots, but you probably won’t need them all since the R815 already has quad-embedded Gigabit ports, and the RAID card has its own dedicated slot as well.

As we’ve shown in our processor performance tests, AMD’s Opteron 6100 has the measure of Intel’s 5600 Xeons and stacks up well against the 6500 and 7500s. Quad-socket applications are where it really scores, though, and Dell’s aggressive pricing for the PowerEdge R815 makes this a reality for SMBs looking to move up to 4P servers and get more processing density out of their rack cabinets.

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