Dell uncages Xeon E3 servers for SMBs

They call it Cougar Point...

The T110 II server has room for four 3.5-inc SAS or SATA disk drives, and comes with software-based PERC S100 and S300 RAID disk controllers on the motherboard. (This is a Cougar Point chipset feature.) The server can also be equipped with a PERC H200 RAID controller, which is a real card not some software pretending to be one.

Dell is supporting 7.2K and 15K SAS drives and 5.4K and 7.2K SATA drives in the box. It comes with a two-port Intel Gigabit Ethernet NIC on the mobo, and additional Ethernet controllers from Intel and Broadcom are available for plugging into the PCI-Express slots. Dell has slapped a Matrox G200eW video card, a IMPI 2.0-compliant baseboard management controller that hooks into Dell's OpenManage server management tools, and a 305-watt power supply into the chassis.

The Dell T110 II is available starting today, but Dell's online configurator doesn't yet allow you to configure and price up a box as El Reg goes to press. Dell says an entry configuration will cost $635, but that is almost certainly not for a useful machine with proper capacity, an operating system, and support.

The second Dell server coming out today is the PowerEdge R210 II, which has similar feeds and speeds as the T110 II but some differences that rack server buyers want.

The machine has the same single Xeon E3-1200 processor socket and the same four memory slots with a maximum of 32GB of main memory. The same C202 chipset controls the box. But the R210 II has only a single PCI-Express x16 slot (instead of a variety of lower-speed peripheral slots) and only room for two 3.5-inch SATA or SAS disk drives; this server can also be configured with solid state drives if that makes your applications happy. The R210 II comes with a 250 watt power supply and the same Matrox video card and baseboard management controller that is used in the T110 II. A base configuration of the R210 II sells for $925; exactly what is in that configuration is not clear, and again, the online configuration and pricing tools have not yet been updated at Dell to let you go figure it out for yourself yet.

The Dell PowerEdge R210 II rack server

Generally speaking, the new T110 has 50 per cent more disk capacity than its predecessor (six drives compared to four) and twice the memory capacity (32GB instead of 16GB). The R210 has double the memory of its predecessor as well. Both machines have more energy-efficient power supplies as well.

Both the PowerEdge T110 II and R210 II servers support Windows Server 2008 R2, including the Foundation Edition and the new Small Business Server 2011 mashup of Windows, SQL Server, and other servers for SMBs. Parkinson says that he expects for SBS 2011 to be particularly popular on the new tower server.

Switching now to PowerConnect switches

As part of the SMB server rollout today, Dell is also updating its homegrown PowerConnect switches with two new families of devices, the 5500 series and 7000 series.

The PowerConnect 5524 is a fixed-port, top-of-rack Gigabit Ethernet switch with 24 ports and two 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks; the switches can be stacked eight high to allow them to be managed as a single logical device. It costs $1,297. The PowerConnect 5528 has 48 Gigabit Ethernet ports plus the two 10GE uplinks; it costs $1,851.

The PowerConnect 7000 series are Layer 3 data center switches. The 7024 model packs 24 ports into a 1U rack-mounted package and deliver 176 GB/sec of aggregate switching bandwidth. The 7024P has 24 ports as well but can support up to 30.8 watts of juice down the Ethernet wire to devices (such as IP telephones) per port. The base PowerConnect 7024 switch and the 7024P has four additional combo ports (which support SFP or standard Gigabit Ethernet ports), while the 7024F has four optional 10GE uplink ports. The 7048 switches doubled the fixed-port count up to 48 and boosts the switching bandwidth up to 224 Gb/sec.

The base 7048 has the four optional SFP or Gigabit Ethernet ports, the 7048P supplies power down the wire on all 48 ports, and the 7048R allows front-to-back or back-to-front cooling. (The R is for Rack.) There is no 7028F model with 10GE uplinks. You can stack up to a dozen of these 7024 or 7048 switches together to create a giant logical switch for network admins to babysit. The 7000 series switches range in price from $3,704 to $6,404, depending on features. ®