Announced last Friday, a Dell PowerEdge R510 mid to low-end rackmount server has landed with a light-ish thud in my corporate testbed facility. I might be joking about the corporate testbed, but I’m not joking about the lightness: having just seen the bruises fade away after shifting my stock of HP LP2000Rs (by donating them to the London Cycle Campaign), it was a major relief to be able to carry and unpack the R510 without cups of tea for the battered-shins posse, cursing, and fresh dents in the back of the estate car.

Comparing the R510 with the old machines is hard, because the simple physical similarity wrongfoots you when you actually absorb the statistics. I gave away 5 LP2000R’s – the virtual machine images of them all would fit, and run, inside the R510 without complaint, and use rather less than half of the current required by just one LP2000R.

Dell have gone for the middle ground with the layout of the R510 – it’s shorter than the normal run of 2U servers at only 24 inches, but manages to wedge 8 drive slots and a pair of Gainestown Xeon 5500s inside that space (Intel are seriously pleased with themselves over Gainestown and the supporting chipset – see Intel’s server video, with chicken).

Usefully, for me at least, the drive slots are sized and structured to take boring old SATA 3.5 inch form factor drives – while one might aspire to HP’s 2.5 inch SAS standard, if cost is a priority it’s nice to be able to use mass market drives in a box that fully understands the upkeep of a RAID array to allow the use of drives that actually do qualify for the ‘I’ in RAID…

I expect to use and abuse the R510 in a couple of forthcoming experiments – some planned, others inadvertent: as soon as I started the box I realised it wanted hardware-specific drivers for the install of Windows 2008, and that the Internet Explorer security configuration had been tweaked slightly to include the Dell site as a trusted destination – but the Dell support automatic model lookup system used web components that IE security configuration didn’t like. Oh, and I have to go and get a heater for the basement – the LP2000R’s used to keep it warm down there, and the R510 doesn’t.

For more details, head to the Dell PowerEdge R510 product page.