Dell PowerEdge 2800 Server  

A power house for medium to large enterprises. It has two dual-core Xeon processors, which give it the high performance ability that our tests showed

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

This is a high performance enterprise class tower-form server from Dell that gives you performance, reliability and expandability under one roof. The server is powered by two dual-core Xeon 2.8 GHz processors with HyperThreading.

It has six DIMM slots that support 144-bit ECC registered PC2-3200 DDR2 and can take in a maximum of 16 GB RAM. The server also comes with an ATI Radeon 7000-M integrated video.  On the storage front, the server can take 10 one-inch internal hot-plug Ultra320 SCSI hard drives. Plus for installation purposes, it comes with an optional optical drive (ours was a CD drive). The server comes with an installation CD that allows you to configure your storage array and then install the OS and required drivers for the server.

Coming to redundancy, the server has dual channel Ultra320 SCSI integrated PERC 4/Di with 256MB of battery-supported cache (supports internal and external storage). It also has a redundant power supply. The chassis of the server is unique in nature, being completely screw-free. This lets you remove each module by unlocking it with the provided tabs. For cooling the entire unit, the Dell PowerEdge 2800 has 10 small fans that blow away the heat generated in the unit. However, Dell has also considered airflow problems, while designing this chassis. That's why there are perforations on its back and front panels. 

Coming to its expandability, the server can be expanded as the organization grows because of its seven I/O slots. It has one hot plug x8 PCI-E slot, one hot plug x4 PCI-E slot, 1 '5V legacy' 32-bit/33 MHz slot and four PCI-X 133 MHz slots.

The Dell PowerEdge 2800 has an integrated dual Intel Gigabit 82541PI Server adapter. For external accessibility, the server has one parallel port and one serial port, and four USB 2.0 ports. Plus it has one extra VGA port on the front that allows you to connect a monitor with the server. A small LCD screen on its front panel alerts you if there are any hardware faults.

In our test, we stressed the server's I/O and Web performance. For the I/O test we used NetBench while for Web we used WebBench. We configured our test bed for RAID level 5 and ran Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition. To generate the loads, we simulated a real-life working environment using 19 Win XP machines emulating 32 clients. This entire cluster was connected to the Dell over a 1 Gbps network.Coming to its performance, NetBench gave us a throughput of 458 Mbit/s with 24 clients and after that there was a fall in transfer rates as we increased load on the server.

On the other hand, it's response time was also affected simultaneously with the decreasing transfer rates. In Web performance, the server was able to reach up to 1241 requests per second with 10 clients and after that it gave us a stable performance of around 1100 requests even as we kept adding more clients.

In the I/O test, the server was able to reach up to 458 Mbit/s with 38 clients, which is a good score		Here, response time was nearly 0.425 ms (NetBench) with 10 clients. After that, it reached 1.4 ms with 38 clients

We compared this Dell server with the Skyrunner that came out as the winner in our December 2005 server shootout. Dell performed better than the Skyrunner with NetBench. However, with the WebBench, the Dell scores the same as the Skyrunner.

The server gave good results with WebBench, and was able to process around 1200 rps with 38 clients

Bottom Line: All performance results show that this PowerEdge is taking advantage of its two dual core Xeon processors and 3 GB RAM. And for the price it comes at, it's worth buying.

Sanjay Majumder

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