Dell PowerEdge 2850

It hasn't taken long for a number of the major blue-chip server vendors to deliver products supporting Intel's EM64T technology. Although Dell was beaten to the punch by Supermicro and HP, it now steps into the ring with a completely new PowerEdge family. Of the other key manufacturers, Fujitsu Siemens has yet to announce any products, while IBM's hideously complex internal mechanisms for dealing with review requests grinds on and on with no sign as yet of its new xSeries servers.

Coming in as a replacement for the 2650, the 2850 on review sits at the top of a pile of four new PowerEdge servers. It delivers a fulsome specification and an unusual internal design in a trim low-profile chassis. The most obvious feature on the front panel is the smart new LCD panel, which provides at-a-glance system status information and error warnings. It glows blue during normal operation, but if an error with the power supplies, fans, system temperature or hard disks is detected it will change to amber and scroll a message across informing you of the problem. The optional bezel covers this completely, so with this fitted you just get a single status indicator. Along with HP's ProLiant ML370 G4, the 2850 also provides six hot-swap drive bays and in this case was supplied with a trio of lower capacity 36GB Seagate Ultra320 hard disks. If you're prepared to settle for only five drive bays there's room for an internal backup option, although only DAT72 is on offer - a format that we haven't been particularly impressed with as its 3MB/sec native transfer rate is too slow for serious server backup.

Internally, the 2850 looks a lot more busy than the ML370. Behind the hard-disk bays is a bank of four hot-swap fans, and Dell has positioned the pair of 3.4GHz Xeon modules as close as possible to these to get plenty of cooling. The Xeons are topped off by large passive heatsinks. Although the modules are easy enough to remove, the arrangements aren't as elegant or as well engineered as those provided in the ML370. Six DIMM sockets supporting DDR2 memory are located further back and covered by a hinged plastic flap also designed to improve airflow. The 2850 supports the new memory-mirroring feature, but to use this you must have identical modules installed in the first two pairs of sockets while the other pair must remain empty. Two more fans sit at the rear and underneath these resides the optional DRAC 4/I remote management card, which adds an extra 10/100BaseTX port to the rear panel.

Due to the location of the large hot-swap power bay there's no room for expansion slots on the motherboard itself, so these have been moved onto a removable vertical daughter card located on the edge of the main board. This plays host to several components - the LSI Ultra320 SCSI controller and optional PERC 4/Di RAID are also sited here. RAID capabilities are enabled simply by plugging in a hardware key on the motherboard. The controller came not only with a battery backup but 256MB of DDR2 cache memory. A choice of expansion cages is on offer, but if you want the model featuring 4x and 8x PCI Express slots you may have to wait as these weren't available at the time of writing.

Management and monitoring tools haven't seen any major improvements. Dell's OpenManage suite still supplies the core services. The Server Administrator offers a fine range of tools for locally monitoring server health while the IT Assistant provides a base from where you can remotely manage any Dell server, workstation or laptop running the OpenManage agent. Remarkably, Dell has finally included an embedded IPMI (intelligent platform management interface) 1.5-compliant baseboard controller as standard. This offers basic SNMP alerting facilities by monitoring system components and firing off traps if a hardware problem is spotted. It supports local access via a serial port link or remote 'IPMI over LAN' connections and allows you to access the system event logs and control the server's power settings independently of the operating system. Note that all IPMI functions will be inaccessible if you opt to team the pair of gigabit network adaptors together.