How it's work R720 Dual Xeon Server? Lets See

We're going to be talking about why everybody should have two dishwashers because why does it make sense to take your dishes out of the dishwasher to just put them in the cab oh wait no this is actually an episode to do with the del R 270 enterprise-grade server yeah it's a 2-u rackmount server sorry I had the wrong script now even though this is the R 270 it is a socket 2011 chassis now xx psyche 2011 has been updated to sake 2011 - 3 so that means this models been updated as well - I think the R 280 that's not actually out yet but the R 2 70s were on sale so we picked one up they're still perfectly capable machine and we're going to give this one a review.

This particular one is outfitted with eight hard drives although you can get the chassis configured for up to 20 hard drives and one of my old criticisms of these types of Dell servers is that they're sort of purpose-built either for storage or for computational power or lots of RAM and doing anything else with them is problematic well not this chassis this chassis actually works well if you need a lot of expansion cards if you need a lot of hard drive space if you need a lot of RAM this chassis does it all and it does it all into you really impressively now if we pop the front off we've got enough room at the left side for a low profile cd-rom and then below that enough room for a three and a half inch tape drive and then you can see our hard drive bays now this one was configured for two-and-a-half inch hard drives.

So they turned vertically and you've got sixteen in the front there's also an optional thing lets you get four more at the back if you really need more space there's also another version of this that has nothing but hard drives all the way across the front we opted for this version because we might get a tape backup unit or some other three-and-a-half inch device to put on this side and it cost extra so it didn't really matter at the front we've also got a VGA connection and LCD readout for the system status and two USB ports just a quick once-over with the top popped off we see the Dell has stuck with their color scheme that's been present for the better part of the last 10-15 years blue plastic is something that can only be swapped when the machine is off and orange plastic is a hot swap capable component so there's not really much in here.

In this particular chassis that's hot swap just the fans the next thing you notice is how much room you've got at the back you know you can see how much room they've left for video cards or dual height coolers or anything in fact you can fit two of those in here and then you still have three half-height expansion slots left now this shows you the different kinds of configurations you can get for the front drives now in our case we've got two mini sized connectors which is about eight channels in total but that's a six and these are mechanical drives so that's fine there are different Bay configurations.

You can have all of these base supported by four mini SAS connectors or you can get front PCI Express so yeah you can get PCI Express drives in a three and a half inch form factor that actually have PCI Express connectors on the front that's another option so you've got some configuration options check that out there's also a version of this chassis I think that has two and a half inch drives all across the front let's take a culture look at the back now the first thing on this side at the back is this carrier now this carrier will hold three PCI Express half height devices these expansion slots are only half width so but they're by eight electrical so you can actually fit a lot of peripherals in here you know a baseband controller and HBA.

From more hard drives for external you know ten gigabit ethernet or anything else like that that you want to put in here in the main area for the expansion slots you've actually got four by sixteen physical but the electrical arrangement is by sixteen by eight by eight by eight so I mean we're talking to twenty eleven CPUs in this chassis so there's an insane amount of PCI Express connectivity and then you've also got the power connector here which is a PCI Express power connector now you've got to have a breakout cable it doesn't come with it but you know you have to order that if you were planning to run a video card or GPU or a Tesla or something like that in here now it may not look like it but because of this expansion slot arrangement you can actually fit two Tesla's or two other you know full-sized graphics cards.

In this server now you don't really want to use a video card that has an aftermarket cooler you have to get a video card that's designed with server cooling in Mac because in mind because it will exhaust from the back to the front the deal with that is that the reference coolers for NVIDIA are basically okay and the reference coolers for AMD are basically okay the other expansion slot on the other side actually has more evening room than the one in the middle but ideally there are different versions that are quote unquote server grade graphics cards if you're going to run desktop virtualization or something like that.

If you're going to run this as a terminal server then and you want your remote users to be able to use Photoshop on thin clients well you could offload your CUDA processing here and that would work pretty well now in the bottom of the case here you can see that there's sort of a daughterboard underneath all the expansion slots this sort of a Dell proprietary PCI Express interface it gives you up to ten gigabits of bandwidth there so that you can run 10 Gigabit Ethernet or in our case we're using four Gigabit Ethernet ports for our particular application we're going to get better performance out of an add-in ten gig card alright so now we're going to take a look at the mid board now this chassis has 128 gigs of ram in.

It's current configuration and we opted to use sixteen gig dims this thing has 24 RAM slots so we can put in an obscene amount of RAM even the other 20 gigs is obscene to begin with but check out the expansion capabilities that we have so we've got our 2 2011 CPUs and this shroud helps ensure that these copper heat pipe things get ample cooling from all those fans that you saw in the front and it sort of ducts it over the rest of the components and the RAM and everything else so the shroud is kind of important in terms of cooling and making sure that the airflow does what we want but this is a crazy amount of RAM I mean that's really good when you're running virtualization workloads it's really good when you're running remote desktop or Terminal Server workloads it's really good for database workloads it's really good for just just about any application that you would be running server-side and I really like that you know down the road I can add a whole bunch more 16-gig dims and take it up to 256 gigs or 384 gigs.

You know a couple of years down the road as I said before the fans are hot-swap so you can just you know squeeze the red triggers or orange triggers and then just pull it out and replace that you can do that while it's on that's fine but everything else with the blue plastic can only be done from the machine is off but this whole assembly lifts out and so you can see a little bit more of the motherboard with the fan cage removed you can get a better view just to see how much cooling this thing has these are serious cooling fans this thing will be insanely loud when it's fully ramped up it is designed to move and just a crazy amount of air through the system.

When it's operating at full capacity now with that removed you can also see how the many SAS cables are routed to the back of the case you can see the battery backup unit that goes with the rate controller because it's not a real RAID controller if it doesn't have a battery backup unit and you can see that that's also not a PCI Express device in the same way that it has been in previous generations it's just sort of an accessory that's mounted to the motherboard but that doesn't interfere with the expansion slot options that you have in the rest of the case so I'm sort of on the fence I don't know how I feel about this I like that the old Bell Park rate controllers were you know just normal PCI Express they might have been in an odd locations I'm depending on the server model but it's just a normal PCI Express adapter but I'm not sure about it now the other nice touch is that you can clearly see they've color-coded the different channels for the RAM so that makes it a little easier when you're populating that you again get all of your RAM channels correct.

For placing your dims because that's important for maximum performance throughput and error correction in the case of using mirrored dims and things like that now for those of you running lightweight hypervisors this also supports a PCI Express riser card that has a redundant SD card slot we didn't get that on this model but I do like that this model has a hidden USB port on the inside so if you're going to run FreeNAS or in some other lightweight linux distribution or something that was designed to run from a USB stick you can totally do that but you're going to do this was in I'd recommend that you get the other riser so that you can run the redundant hypervisors on the PCI Express riser that's a much better option because it's basically a raid 1 of micro SD cards and that's a much better option the motherboard also has some accessible SATA ports.

As well as another I think a PCI Express power connector options so you can you know if you've got a dual power connector graphics card or whatever you can you can still run that and then the other things that you see there are the the business end of the power supply this is a compact to lay out without being cramped now normally when you don't order an option with Dell they don't send you the cables which is annoying but in this case they actually have included the cables for hooking up a slimline cd-rom so if you buy the server without a cd-rom then the cables for it are already installed so it would literally take 12 seconds of work to install a slot loading compact slimline cd-rom in this if you wanted to but as with pretty much all rackmount.

Dells since the beginning of time this chassis of course does support the popin slide mount rails so you can you can put it in a rack and pull it out like a drawer pretty standard feature but just in case you forgot there it is now at the back here's another view of those three expansion expansion slots we were looking at before those are the half sized one below that you've got the odd rack which is the integrated ipmi option if you haven't seen IBM I or heard of what IPMI is just search for our article on ipmi that's that's the sort of open amrican megatrends version dell has their own proprietary version that's different from that but basically has the same features then you got rs-232 serial which is good for you know older UPS's or older equipment that you may want to interface with VGA to USB for Gigabit Ethernet.

This is these are the ethernet ports that we run that proprietary card I was telling you about this black thing here's a handle to make it easier to you know schlep this thing around and then you've got 2000 or - 1100 watt 80 plus Platinum power supplies and then you can see the expansion slots and you've got a room for cooling over here as well now I think at the back of this area where it's got the vent that's where you would have your four other two and a half inch drive basis in the back here now I wanted to give you guys an overview of the UEFI but there's so little features in the UEFI that there's probably no point now by default this thing will come configure for performance per watt ba a PC which is uh not something that most people want probably I mean unless you're going to buy 50 of these and stick them in.

You know in Iraq and you're in the data center and you're concerned about performance per watt I'm just going to set this thing for performance you'll get a little bit of a performance bump and it'll straighten it you know when you're running benchmarks and weird things are happening it turns out it might have been this setting so yeah I think bail charges you like three dollars extra to change that which is just weird as for the rest of the UEFI it's about as bare-bones as you can get you can configure some of the I'll add in option roms now without going back in I'm not sure if the previous generation was like that but as of a couple of generations ago you know if you went into the idrac setup to set up its IP address or you went into the UEFI or the bios or you went into you know your HPA or your added utility.

You had to reboot you know when you when you were done with that but this seems to let you move around to the odd rack into the UEFI and to the add-in cards without forcing you to reboot which is a nice feature well that's been it for the Dell you know overview of the our 270 server now this is 28 so I could 2011 2011 - 3 is right around the corner and that's probably going to be the Dell r 280 a lot of what we've covered in this article will apply to the r 280 line no doubt because that's just going to be the 2011 - 3 update if you guys got one of these or or looked at it or anything weird happen we had some strange things happen when we were testing it but you know you know let us know we've also got full benchmarks over at Tech Syndicate comm we get a nice PowerPoint put together and it's got the disk benchmarks you know we have eight disks so we did you know raid ten raid 1 raid 5 raid 60 rate 50 and just about every combination you can think of we also did it with and without SSDs and so this is these are at in SSDs Dell ludicrously will charge like $2,000 for the SSD option so we added a couple of Samsung 850 s and you know set those up on the controller and did a whole bunch of benchmarking with and without those turns out those helped I ops but killed throughput because the controller seems to.

Always use the SSD where possible even for multi-threaded workloads so we're not really sure what that's about we need to create a whole bunch of virtual machines and do more in depth benchmarking but if you want to take a look at the overview of the benchmarking and I'd suggest you check out the numbers we've got a doe and a whole bunch of other benchmarks at tech syndicate comm so check that out I'll be in the forums this is Wendell for Texas etiquette signing off are you playing that Skyrim on a surface RT yeah this is a surface RT it's not even in that's arm that's not even x86 yeah I thought even x86 how are you doing this and on the surface RT well it's actually really not that bad.