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Dell shows off its heavy-metal server range

Posted on 22 Oct 2010 at 17:31

Resident head-banger Steve Cassidy visits London's O2 arena for some seriously heavy metal, but not of the music variety

In the back of the 02 stadium (the venue formerly known as the Millennium Dome), there’s a room covered in graffiti scrawled by the famous rock stars who’ve played there, and during the steamiest part of this summer fellow editor Jon Honeyball and I happened to be there for Dell’s annual TechCamp.

This event offers techies the opportunity to be let out of their padded server rooms and meet up with writers and analysts from all over Europe, and also to get our hands on kit that’s so rare or expensive that it’s seldom seen the light of day.

The connection between that blade server Jon’s holding in the photo above (which we’re allowed to show you) and the boxes hidden away in that graffiti-covered back room (which we can’t show you) is they all form part of Dell’s forthcoming heavy-metal server range – and when I say heavy metal, I mean really heavy.

When I say heavy metal, I mean really heavy

Jon’s holding the half-size blade because the full-sized one, populated with Nehalem or Westmere processors and improbably large quantities of RAM, requires two people to lift it.

Dell’s kickoff speaker proudly informed us there were three tons of kit on the small stage, a figure that half the audience – let’s say the newcomer, web-analyst types – immediately began to Twitter about (we could see their Twitter feeds) while we paper-based old goats all sneered, that is until we got down onto the stage and tried picking a few pieces up.

The packing densities of both processors and memory have been increasing by leaps and bounds recently, and Dell actually had one machine on stage containing a full terabyte of RAM.

Just to keep us all on our toes, this mighty machine contains a new Dell-patented processor slot-blanking system that does away with the old restrictions about large numbers of memory slots having to be paired up in weirdly convoluted ways with their nearest CPU slot.

Old school

Old hands at server bodging such as myself may well remember the days when it made sense to buy lots of small capacity sticks of RAM to fill up all your server slots, which enables the server’s memory controller to change mode from running up and down the SIMMs to a mode where it hits all the filled slots simultaneously: this trick used to be a particularly prized brand of snake oil in hardware-fiddling circles, because it made memory access much faster for free.

I have my doubts about how many of you will have £47,000 spare to fully populate a server able to take 1,000GB of memory

The modern version of this scenario doesn’t have to do with single RAM slots but with entire banks of RAM. Four-socket, single- or multi-core enterprise servers have pretty well always required a tight association between processors and RAM banks: if there’s a processor present in a particular socket, then it will have faster access to the bank of RAM nearest to that socket.

Dell’s new invention offers a way of breaking that architectural limitation. I have my doubts about how many of you will have £47,000 spare to fully populate a server able to take 1,000GB of memory, that being the estimated cost we came up with (using several people’s fingers to do the counting) for building such a configuration.

The Man from Intel

Those doubts faded away somewhat once I had a chat with the Man from Intel. He was a bit of a Napoleon Solo, able to crash a server with a click of the old, well-worn buttons on his laptop.

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