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Dell PowerEdge R715 review

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Verdict

Dell's first 2P Opteron 6100 server offers a good-value platform for virtualisation duties

Review Date: 25 Nov 2010

Reviewed By: Dave Mitchell

Price when reviewed: £5,229 (£6,144 inc VAT)

Overall Rating

Features & Design
5 stars out of 6

Value for Money
5 stars out of 6

Performance
5 stars out of 6

PCPRO Recommended

Since their launch in early 2010, AMD's Opteron 6100 series of processors have garnered much interest from the blue chips. In this review, we take a closer look at Dell's first dual-socket Opteron 6100 rack server, the PowerEdge R715, and see how it measures up to HP's A-Listed ProLiant DL385 G7.

AMD claims the Opteron 6100 removes the artificial price barrier to 4P computing. In our review of Dell's quad-socket PowerEdge R815 we agreed, since this 2U rack server was far more cost-effective than a four-socket Xeon 7500 server.

Move down to 2P platforms and the advantages aren't so clear-cut, as the Opterons face stiff competition from Intel's 5500 and 5600 Xeons. AMD scores higher for physical cores; the R715 comes with a pair of 12-core Opteron 6174 modules. The six-core 5600 Xeons can match this, but only with Intel's Hyper-Threading producing 24 logical cores.

The R715 shares the same chassis with the R815 and the R810, where the front panel is split into two sections. The lower half provides unimpeded airflow through the chassis, while in the top half you have a hot-swap hard disk bay, an optical drive and Dell's nifty LCD panel, which provides clear visual warnings of faults.

Dell is promoting the R715 as a general-purpose server, but for storage duties it doesn't come close to the DL385 G7. The front-panel design only has room for up to six SFF hard disks, whereas the DL385 offers a maximum of 16 hot-swap bays.

Drive options are extensive, with Dell offering 2.5in SAS, SATA, SSD and the latest 500GB near-line SAS drives. Unlike the DL385, there's no embedded RAID controller, but you can pick from a PERC H200 or H700, with the latter supporting RAID5 plus 512MB or 1GB cache and battery backup options.

The R715 scores highly as a virtualisation platform, however. First is its memory capacity: the server supports up to 256GB running at 1,333MHz, although a full set of 16GB RDIMMs will cost more than £13,000.

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Comments

User comments

virtualization considerations

... just few words about virtualization using VMware software. Regardless how sweet 24cores/box may sound, Opteron based servers are not a sensible choice for SME's.

According to VMware vSphere's pricing:
http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/pricing.htm
l

Dell R710 is much cheaper choice. vShpere licenses for 2P servers with 12+cores are around 10-fold the price for similarly performing 2P servers with 6core Xeons.

By stasi47 on 25 Nov 2010

VMware software licensing not an issue

There is the misconception that AMD systems will cost more because of VMware licensing policies - as highlighted by stasi47 comment.

However - you need to compare total system price - not just software costs - to get the real picture

Take a look at some of the pricing comparisions in this blog
http://blogs.amd.com/work/2010/07/06/simply-specta
cular-virtualization-%E2%80%93-the-value-4p-%E2%80
%9Cmagny-cours%E2%80%9D-edition/

TCO is calculated on the entire system cost - not just the price of software

By mlewis on 30 Nov 2010

RE: VMware software licensing not an issue

As expected, the comparison you pointed out, is utterly useless for SMEs - please keep in mind that in my previous comment, I was explicitly referring to SMEs. However what worries me most, is that the presented cost scheme even in case of larger enterprises doesn't add up to a can of beans.

Allow me to point out few discrepancies:
1. The system with an Intel X5650 processor has about 5.2GB RAM / vCPU (64GB/12cores) the AMD-based system has only half of it! That additional 128GB RAM will costs you about $12000.
2. Referring to common benchmarks (and sense?) Opterons 6174 with its 12cores aren't twice as fast as 6core Xeons X5650. They more or less perform op par with X5650. ( http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html ) Which means that you need twice as many Opteron-based vCPUs to get the job done as quickly as using X5650-based vCPU.

So adding $12000 for 128GB RAM and multiplying the cost of one VM by two (as you need two Opteron-based vCPUs instead of one Xeon-based vCPU). You will get more or less: $2274 per single VM!

Still, in that very limited cost calculation on AMD's blog, there is not a single word about possible bottlenecks when keeping 24VMs, compared to Intel's 12VMs on a single iron. (e.g.: you are not going to outfit AMD based servers with twice as many iSCSI controllers for free).
Also there is no mention about single point of failure. I would prefer a server failure with 12 vCPUs to a server failure with 48 vCPUs as VMotioning that many cores needs, uhm well, 48 vCPUs available.

Please keep mind that when writing these words I am not trying to make yet another AMD-Intel flame war. What I would like to point out is that VMware pricing policy is totally sick, unfair and needs to be changed.

By stasi47 on 1 Dec 2010

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