The power to do more – servers that perform

Authored By John Barnhart: Dell Enterprise Product Group, Technical Marketing

The slogan “The Power to do More” has never been more appropriate when discussing Dell’s latest PowerEdge 2 Socket servers combined with the latest 4 and 6 core Intel Xeon 5600 Westmere-EP processors.

On February 14, 2011 Dell announced a very significant update to the entire lineup of two-socket PowerEdge servers, including the M610, M710, M610X and M710HD blades, R710, R610, R510, R410, C1100, C2100, C6100 rack servers, and T710, T610, T410 towers with new Intel Xeon 5600 series Westmere-EP processors.

It is reasonable to assume that a great deal of attention was directed at Dell by the tech world considering the extensive depth of the refresh, especially when it offered the latest Intel 4 and 6 core processors at previous dual core price points. Yes, that is right, up to six cores at previous price parity.

However, one day after the Westmere-EP announcement Dell released financial results that were so far above financial analysts expectation that the buzz throughout the world about Dell’s financial success overshadowed what may just be one of the most significant processor upgrades in Dell’s product line since the release of Dell 11th Generation PowerEdge servers in 2009.

Dell PowerEdge Blade, Rack and Tower servers are widely popular with a variety of customers for their ease of management, virtually tool less serviceability, power and thermal efficiency and customer inspired designs, but when it comes to performance they have once again leap-frogged the competition by offering significant gains in performance with the latest Intel Xeon 5600 series refresh.

As an example, testing conducted by Dell’s internal laboratories using a 1U 2Socket R610 rack server equipped with the new X5687, 3.60 GHz Intel Xeon processor, delivered previously unachieved performance benchmarks above any other competitors 8, 12, and 32 core product in both SPECint_rate2006 and SPECfp_base2006 as detailed on www.spec.org. When reviewing the benchmark list the competitors which Dell testing results blew past is extensive and includes products from IBM, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, and Oracle/Sun, just to name a few.

Dell’s use of the Intel Xeon 5600 Westmere-EP processor to refresh its lineup of two socket servers offers customers the opportunity to realize outstanding integer-computing throughput and floating-point computation performance at a level previously not available on Dell Power Edge 2 socket blade, rack and tower servers.

Get past the technical buzzwords and what it means to PowerEdge customers in real-terms is that they can expect to see improved performance as they share, access and update the most commonly used files across their network including word documents, spreadsheets, graphics presentations, 3D applications as well as various other financial, analytical and highly algorithm dependent data shares.

Every newly released Intel 5600 processor, regardless of where it appears in the stack, offers AES-NI and TXT technology specifically designed to reduce malware risks so virtualized mission critical applications are more secure making previously dedicated servers available for upgrades, re-purposing, or replaced as business needs change.

For those waiting to perform a refresh so they could dive deeply into the virtualization era or IT managers struggling to keep their servers online with duct tape, bubble gum and a prayer, the time has never been better to upgrade to Dell PowerEdge 2 socket servers with the latest Intel Xeon 5600 series processors.

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About the Author: John Barnhart