Dell Intel Server Review Guide

©2012 Dell and Intel

SMB Server Review 2012

Brought to you compliments of: IntroductionThe old adage “the only thing constant is change” is an apt assessment of the current state of organizations’ network infrastructures. And nowhere is change occurring more rapidly than with respect to server hardware.

The accelerated adoption of virtualization (server, application, virtual desktop infrastructure and storage), the emergence of cloud computing and the advent of powerful new processor and storage technologies herald changes in both the business and technology landscape.

Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

DataAnalysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Virtualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

PrivateandHybridCloudDeployments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Storage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Dell12thGenerationPowerEdgeServersandtheIntelXeonProcessorE5Family . . . . . 8

UserComments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

2 ©2012 Dell and Intel

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From a technology standpoint, organizations must grapple with changing use cases. These include:

• New server and processor form factors

• Mainstream adoption of various types of virtualization, ranging from server, VDI, application and storage

• The rapid rise in unstructured data (streaming digital audio and video), which exponentially increases storage requirements

• The need to improve performance while reducing power and energy consumption

• The increasing complexity of applications

• The need to support the growing remote and mobile workforce

• The 2012 release of Microsoft’s Windows 8

• The need to bolster security

• The need to cut costs

Purchasing a server is no longer a straightforward decision. Organizations, particularly small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) with more limited budgets and IT expertise, find themselves confronted with a confusing array of processor and server choices.

Businesses must consider myriad factors and choose the technology that best aligns with their goals. The choice of servers and the processors that power them will have an immediate and direct impact on business operations. Conversely, the ramifications of a bad or inadequate server purchase can negatively impact a company, its business operations and its users for years.

From a business perspective, it’s not enough for C-level executives and IT departments to base their server purchasing decisions on the organization’s present requirements. They must also be prescient and “future-proof” the server infrastructure. This means purchasing powerful, scalable hardware that will endure for the platform’s entire two-, three- or four-year life cycle. Other key concerns are integration and interoperability with existing and legacy servers, applications and drivers, as well as the vendor’s track record on technical service, support and responsiveness.

Buyers, especially SMBs, are advised to examine carefully how the advancements in server hardware and processor technology can positively impact their purchasing and deployment plans in 2012 and beyond.

This Server Reviewer’s Guide will examine the rapid changes in server hardware and processor technology and highlight the business and technology trends in the server market. It will also provide organizations with the insight they need to make informed purchasing decisions over next 12 months.


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DataAnalysisThe challenge confronting SMBs and all users is: How do you achieve cost/performance/reliability gains without performing a disruptive, expensive and time-consuming overhaul to the entire infrastructure?

Server hardware and the processors that power them are the bedrock upon which the operational efficiency of the entire network infrastructure rests. The servers’ ability to deliver top-notch performance and availability to support virtualization, private and hybrid cloud deployments, and growing storage requirements will positively or negatively impact the business and its bottom-line capital and operational costs. This includes end-user productivity and ongoing IT department maintenance activities.

Robust servers will bolster the organization’s ability to service its clients, suppliers and business partners that need access to corporate data, and ultimately lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) and accelerate return on investment. Weak or inadequate server platforms will undermine the entire network as well as business operations, and put the company at risk.

Servers must also provide ease-of-use features to assist SMBs and their IT departments with fast provisioning, oversight and troubleshooting.

It’s no secret that information technology has changed quite a bit in the past several years. The traditional client/server computing model is changing and expanding to encompass new and emerging technologies such as virtualization and private, public and hybrid cloud environments. On the client side, end users are no longer restricted to company-issued PCs or notebooks. They are now connecting to the corporate network via an ever-widening array of smartphones, tablets and ultra-light notebooks. Remote access and mobility are also on the upswing, and users are leveraging social media networks to work and spread the word about their companies to increase productivity and profits.

An IDC study commissioned by Dell found that approximately eight out of 10 survey participants worldwide anticipate that demand for remote access to the corporate network, connection via consumer devices, upgrades to IT-supplied applications and technology, and collaboration tools will increase in the next year.

At the same time, corporations need to automate, simplify and streamline their IT processes and rein in the complexity that naturally occurs when businesses deploy new and disruptive technolo-gies. IDC survey respondents cited complexity as their biggest IT management-related challenge.

Robust servers like Dell’s newly released 12th Generation PowerEdge servers and Intel’s state-of-the-art Xeon E5 Processor family can provide SMBs with a rock-solid foundation that delivers high-density, energy-efficient performance while reducing power consumption. Dell servers equipped with Intel processors will increase the efficiency of the entire network and provide performance gains to support virtualization and cloud deployments and handle greater storage demands. Dell can deliver these gains at a price point that is cost-effective and affordable for all levels of businesses.

Since servers also function as the foundation for the overall application and network infrastructure,a solid, leading-edge server environment will also boost uptime and availability. Like their enterprise


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counterparts, SMBs are more risk-averse than ever. Four and five “nines” of uptime — 99.99% and 99.999%, which equates to 52 minutes and 5.25 minutes of unplanned downtime per server, per year, respectively — is becoming the new industry standard.

This is especially crucial as users demand 24/7 access to data. Corporations are also tasked with delivering ubiquitous connectivity to accommodate the burgeoning ranks of workers requiring remote and mobile access. This means that companies must find better ways to manage the ongoing data deluge and administer complex infrastructure updates and upgrades across diverse applications and devices such as smartphones and tablets and still deliver superior availability.

Some 49% of companies now require 99.99% and 99.999% availability for their mission-critical line-of-business servers and applications, according to an October 2011 survey of 450 businesses by Information Technology Intelligence Consulting (ITIC). That same survey found that 32% of participants said their businesses need at least 99.9% availability; this is the equivalent of 8.76 hours of unplanned per server downtime per year. One hour of server downtime can cost a company tens of thousands or even millions of dollars, putting the business and its customers, partners and suppliers at risk. The less downtime a company experiences, the less risk it incurs and the less chance of litigation and damage to its reputation.

SMBs should opt for servers that guarantee the processing power, speed, performance and reli-ability required to handle even the most data-intensive digital applications — at a reasonable cost. No business, regardless of size or vertical market, will see its server requirements shrink.

Four of the most crucial drivers that will impact and influence the SMB’s server purchases are:

• Virtualization

• Private or hybrid cloud deployments

• Storage requirements

• Underlying processor technology

Below is a detailed analysis of the trends and advances in each of these pivotal areas.

VirtualizationNo technology over the past several years has had a greater impact on the network infrastructure than virtualization. Times have changed, though. All forms of virtualization have become increas-ingly complex. Research from Gartner indicates that 50% or more of workloads will run on virtual machines (VMs) in 2012. And within the next three to five years, the percentage of virtualized servers will almost certainly overtake and surpass non-virtualized environments.

The first waves of server-based virtualization deployments (circa 2004 to 2007) were straightfor-ward and easily accomplished. IT managers found they could easily virtualize main line-of-business applications, halve their capital expenditures on hardware acquisitions and reduce ongoing operational expenditures.


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The benefits of virtualization are accelerating mainstream adoption. In addition to slashing capital and operational costs, they include:

• The ability to consolidate the physical number of servers

• The ability to save physical floor space, lowering facility rental/leasing costs

• The ability to cut energy consumption (heating and cooling)

• Improved load balancing

• Improved storage, disaster recovery and backup initiatives

• Faster provisioning of server-based applications to end users

• Greater economies of scale and business agility

• A more competitive and flexible business model

• A stepping-stone and solid foundation for cloud computing environments

The right combination of Dell 12th Generation PowerEdge servers based on the latest Intel Xeon Processor E5 family, deployed in a well-architected and well-planned virtualized data center, will deliver all of the above business and technology benefits.

These benefits will not occur automatically, however.

Virtualization has caveats. Virtual machines cause density to increase exponentially. This, in turn, results in greater administrative complexity and increased reliance on data center capabilities and reliability.

Careful planning is required to consolidate resources, cut costs, achieve higher performance, increase reliability, ease management, solve load-balancing and storage issues, and shore up security. For example, corporations that utilize Dell’s 3-2-1 Reference Configurations, built on new Intel Xeon Processor E5-2680-based Dell PowerEdge R720 servers, can easily select, order and deploy a virtualized infrastructure that aligns with their business and technology needs. Selecting a proven architecture from Dell can ease and speed the deployment process and eliminate the human errors typically associated with new deployments.

Servers should also be able to scale to expand and adjust the virtualized workloads for at least two to three years. Ideally, a well-configured virtualized server hardware platform will alleviate time and management burdens because the IT department has fewer physical appliances to manage and provision. This, in turn, can help companies reduce ongoing operational costs, which typically account for 70% to 80% of the IT budget.

Cost and time management savings will vary according to the individual SMB’s virtualized server infrastructure, but companies can expect overall cost reductions ranging from 15% to 35%.

PrivateandHybridCloudDeploymentsLike their enterprise counterparts, SMBs are increasingly, albeit cautiously, deploying private and hybrid cloud environments.


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Private and hybrid cloud infrastructures offer the promise of:

• Easier, simplified management

• A grid computing-like “pay for what you use” model

• The ability to provide better service to customers, partners and employees

• Lower operational expenses and lower up-front capital expenditure costs

• The ability to scale the network according to the needs of the business

• Improved end-user productivity

• Increased protection from malware and various network hacks and intrusions

Cloud computing also has caveats. By far the biggest technical concerns with respect to cloud deployments are availability and latency in response times. Organizations require uninterrupted services and want assurances that any disruptions or outages will be very minimal. Superlative performance and reliability, excellent technical service and support from inception to deployment, and ongoing maintenance are must-haves. Businesses also want their cloud providers to clearly demonstrate how the cloud infrastructure improves upon their current data center environments.

Dell 12th Generation PowerEdge servers are focused on hyperscale capability. Rather than emphasizing gigahertz and gigabytes, these servers help SMBs to maximize density, memory and serviceability while lowering TCO. Dell 12th Generation PowerEdge Servers provide the processing power corporations need while conserving physical space and consuming less power, thereby lowering operational costs.

StorageIt’s widely documented that storage requirements are increasing dramatically for all classes of users. Even the most static of SMB companies with 25 or 50 users realize that storage require-ments are on a steep upward trajectory. The increase in network-attached storage, larger data volumes, machine data and the steep growth of unstructured data and more complex applications such as streaming digital audio and video media along with larger data files, charts, high-resolution digital images and 16- and 32-slice CAT scans all consume more of a business’ precious storage capacity. These new storage types are swallowing valuable storage space and resources at an accelerated rate, far outpacing what simple document files require.

A 2010 survey of 246 businesses by Enterprise Strategy Group found that a 58% majority of respondents experience annual storage growth rates of 11% to 30%. Not surprisingly, storage virtualization deployments are also on the upswing. ITIC’s October 2011 survey revealed that 44% of participants have virtualized at least a portion of their storage infrastructure, while a 64% majority of respondents indicated that they plan to deploy storage virtualization in 2012–2013.

The strong, sustained surge in storage virtualization adoption is attributable to:

• Unprecedented growth and demand for storage.

• An increase in both the size and the types of stored files.


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• The immediate negative impact a lack of storage has on the organization and its network infrastructure.

• Easier administration; IT managers can oversee and provision distributed storage as though it were a singular, consolidate resource.

• Improved network availability and utilization; applications are no longer tied to a specific storage resource. From an administrative and functional perspective, it no longer matters on which storage subsystem, disk drive or partition the data or application resides.

• Automatic deployment and provisioning of storage resources; there’s no need to take the server offline and disrupt operations.

The increase in storage requirements place greater demands and burdens on the servers and processors. Robust servers and state-of-the-art processors to achieve the availability and throughput they need and avoid performance degradation.

A well-run storage or virtualized storage infrastructure enables the business and its IT depart-ment to improve server resource utilization, realize greater economies of scale, centralize man-agement and reduce the amount of physical floor space needed, which means lower utility and facility rental/leasing costs. Consolidating server-based storage resources has the potential to shave 10% to 35% on up-front capital expenditures on average and lower ongoing operational expenses from 10% to 25%, depending on the size and scope of the network.

In addition, an efficient storage or storage virtualization infrastructure improves disaster recovery and business continuity. This is especially crucial, since the complexity of the IT infrastructure (hardware, applications and networking gear) has increased substantially over the past 12 to 24 months — a trend that shows no sign of abating.

Companies simply cannot afford to max out their storage.

Dell 12th Generation PowerEdge servers outfitted with the Intel Xeon Processor E5 family solve SMBs’ most critical storage needs and challenges. This includes:

• Storing, protecting and managing rapidly growing structured and unstructured data

• Overseeing and monitoring increasingly virtualized data centers and applications

• Simplifying management of a virtualized storage and DR environment

• Providing high availability

• Ensuring quick recovery from outages and access to stored and virtualized data

The latest Dell 12th Generation servers enable businesses to automate storage tiering. The CacheCade I/O accelerator option allows companies to maximize performance in workloads with a high number of random reads (e.g., databases). It does this by caching the frequently accessed data to a solid-state disk and saves the data until it is modified. This feature can help you gain performance in these workloads without resorting to using extra spindles to improve seek times.

Dell’s integrated, interoperable, standards- based servers and storage offerings deliver highly reliable, manageable, cost-effective solutions and aftermarket technical services and support —


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minus the finger-pointing that many users experience from their vendors in the wake of an outage. Most important, downtime is minimized, which reduces monetary losses and lessens the burden on the IT department. It also helps to mitigate risk and insulate the business from the potential losses that can ensue if the company’s reputation is damaged.

Dell12thGenerationPowerEdgeServersandtheIntelXeonProcessorE5FamilyThe Dell 12th Generation PowerEdge server line addresses the full range of corporate computing options and needs. It includes tower systems, blades and racks for a wide range of organizations, from small businesses to hyperscale datacenters. The servers are available in form factors and price points to fit every need and budget.

Dell’s 12th Generation PowerEdge servers offer tangible performance and reliability benefits. They are specifically engineered to handle today’s increasingly complex and data-intensive workloads and at the same time provide the scalability and flexibility to allow organizations to future-proof their server infrastructure and accommodate virtualization and cloud environments. They enable corporations and IT departments to overcome their most daunting challenges, including the need to reduce complexity and provide higher reliability and availability, increased performance, greater capacity and improved security.

OverviewoftheIntelXeonProcessorE5Family

The just released Intel Xeon Processor E5 family, code-named Sandy Bridge, works syner-gistically with Dell 12th Generation PowerEdge servers. Intel’s Xeon Processor E5 family delivers the leading-edge features needed to support virtualization, cloud computing and content streaming activities and applications.

Speaking at the Super Computing ’11 trade show in Seattle last November, Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of Intel’s Technical Computing, Intel Datacenter and Connected Systems group, said that the Intel Xeon Processor E5 family is the first server processor to support full integration of the PCI Express 3.0 specification. The PCIe 3.0 is estimated to double the interconnect bandwidth over the PCIe 2.0 specification and also enables lower power and higher density server implementations. New fabric controllers taking advantage of the PCI Express 3.0 specification will allow more efficient scaling of performance and data transfer with the growing number of nodes in high-performance supercomputers. The early perfor-mance benchmarks revealed that the Intel Xeon E5 delivers up to 2.1 times more performance in raw floating point operations per second (FLOPS). Intel said customers can achieve up to 80% higher performance using real high-performance computing workloads compared with the previous generation of Intel Xeon 5600 series processors.

The Intel Xeon Processor E5 family offers more cores, cache and memory capacity, and includes Intel® Integrated I/O, which increases I/O capacity and reduces latency up to 30%

Continued


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The latest Dell 12th Generation PowerEdge server line is a family of six servers (see sidebar). All of the models address the need for increased performance, reliability, flexibility and ease of use and enable organizations to run more complex, data-intensive workloads more efficiently. The Dell 12th Generation PowerEdge servers also address a wide variety of business needs. For example, the T620 is a scalable, two-socket tower server suitable for remote and branch offices; the M620 is a blade server aimed at small and midsize datacenters; the R620 is a dense, 2S/1U rack server; and the R720 and R720xd are extremely scalable 2S and 4S/2U rack servers.

It also incorporates Intel’s Intelligent Power Technology, which dynamically optimizes energy efficiency, ensuring higher performance while lowering data center costs. Intel Xeon E5 processors are ideal for demanding technical applications, since IntelAdvanced Vector In-structions (Intel® AVX) boosts performance up to 2x for vector and floating point operations.

Other key benefits of the Intel Xeon Processor E5 are:

• Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (AES-NI)

• New Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (256 bit)

• Intel Turbo Boost 2.0

• 8MB Level 3 CPU cache

• Intel Hyper-Threading technology

• Data Center Manageability Interface

Intel’s 32nm Xeon Processor E5 family incorporates a micro-architecture that unifies the processor cores, memory controller and last-level cache (LLC). The resulting benefits include fast core access to shared data in LLC, higher memory bandwidth and intelligent performance-to-workload matching. The Intel Xeon Processor E5 family also gives current and future virtualized and cloud compute-intensive applications new performance gains by taking advantage of Intel’s Advanced Vector Extensions. This is a 256-bit instruction set extension to the Intel SSE. As noted above, the Xeon Processor E5 family also incorporates support for Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (AES-NI), which encourages pervasive encryption by reducing the associated performance penalties.

The Intel Xeon Processor E5 family includes Intel Turbo Boost Technology 2.0. This feature automatically gives more computing power when you need it with performance that adapts to spikes in your workload. The Turbo Boost Technology is especially crucial in virtualized and cloud environments that demand optimal speed, processing power and reliability. Intel’s Xeon E5 processors also deliver industry-leading performance, management and security capabilities.

Overall, the combination of the new 12th Generation Dell PowerEdge servers equipped with the latest Intel Xeon Processor E5 family provide businesses with all of the state-of-the-art power, speed, reliability, manageability and security they need to support server, storage and application virtualization and emerging cloud deployments.


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The Dell PowerEdge servers:

• Ease IT’s burden by streamlining and automating tasks

• Reduce complexity with “agent-free” intelligence embedded in hardware

• Provide investment protection with systems management solutions that easily integrate with existing and legacy management infrastructures

• Incorporate virtualization capabilities that enable rapid capacity deployments to handle increased demand

• Are engineered to accommodate complex workloads

• Allow corporations to gain faster access to critical information for business intelligence applications using innovative I/O and internal data management technologies (NDC, NPAR, CacheCade)

• Increase performance and capacity for the most demanding collaboration workloads (720xd)

• Achieve a higher level of transaction performance for ERP solutions with the right combination and balance of processors, memory and I/O (SSD, CacheCade)

• Solve complex high-performance computing challenges faster with GPU accelerators

The latest Dell PowerEdge servers also address business challenges such as lowering utility costs, reducing power consumption and reducing the time it takes administrators to service the hardware. Data center power and cooling costs can represent as much as 50% of an organization’s energy consumption. The Uptime Institute reports that data center energy consumption doubled from 2000 to 2006, and that trend continues unabated. The Dell 12th Generation PowerEdge servers deliver:

• Twice the density of traditional 1U servers without sacrificing features such as hot-plug hard-drive flexibility and single-node serviceability.

• A shared infrastructure design that uses less floor space, power and cooling.

• The ability to service individual nodes, without requiring IT managers to take the server offline. This feature potentially increases uptime by as much as 75% compared with competing solutions from competitors like Hewlett-Packard. Dell PowerEdge nodes can be serviced independently.

• The ability to configure the server with two nodes for more drives across the front of the server, providing businesses with more ways to leverage the same chassis.

• The ability to share power supplies, fans and backplanes. This significantly lowers the total amount of power consumed for energy efficiency and reduces operating costs, which is the goal of every business. The result: Organizations realize a 92% efficient power supply, which is the Gold standard for servers.

Dell specifically designed its devices for maximum flexibility and simplified management. Dell’s PowerEdge Select Network Adaptor, for instance, enables companies to migrate between 1GB


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and 10GB interconnects directly on the motherboard, providing added flexibility when needed. This feature also helps businesses future-proof their networks.

The iDRAC7, Dell’s agentless systems management tool, simplifies management tasks. It provides administrators with direct access to hardware status, inventory and configuration

regardless of whether or not the operating system is down or not installed. The result is a higher degree of detailed oversight, requiring fewer resources. Dell’s PowerEdge Express Flash SSD will connect solid-state drives directly to the PCIe Gen 3 bus, providing incredibly fast data access and significantly boosting application performance. And the OpenManage Power Center capability gives corporations the ability to better control their cooling costs.

OverviewofDell12thGenerationPowerEdgeServers

Dell’s newly introduced 12th Generation PowerEdge server line is a family of six devices, offering tower, rack and blade configurations designed to provide a wide, flexible array of choices to address the specific business and budgetary needs of SMBs as well as hyperscale data centers. All six of the Dell 12th Generation PowerEdge servers have been architected to run complex workloads more efficiently. The devices ease administration via built-in intel-ligence capabilities and provide increased server utilization in virtualization environments.

The six new servers are:

TowerServer:

• T620, a scalable two-socket system targeted at remote and branch offices.

RackServers:

• R620, a dense, 2S/1U rack management server that supports eight cores per processor, 32GB of RAM and a core frequency of 2.20 GHz; equipped with the Intel Xeon E5-2660 processor.

• R720, a rack host server that supports eight cores per processor, up to 64GB of RAM and a core frequency of 2.70 GHz; equipped with the Intel Xeon E5-2680 processor.

• R720XD, a rack host server that includes the above components and is equipped with up to 26 2.5-inch internal drives.

• C6220, a rack server that is specifically designed for cloud storage and is multi- node optimized.

BladeServer:

• M620, a dense, 2S/1U blade solution that incorporates large memory and flexible I/O options. Its 10 Gigabit Ethernet capability uses Dell’s modular Select Network Adapter. The server provides businesses with the ability to dynamically allocate bandwidth across I/O ports and efficiently manage spikes that may occur during periods of high usage on applications such as Microsoft Exchange Server and SharePoint Server.


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The combination of the Dell 12th Generation servers and the Intel Xeon Processor E5 family let businesses proactively address their most urgent business and technology needs as they expand their existing virtualized environments and begin to transition to a cloud infrastructure. Dell and Intel’s collective experience and long-standing strategic partnership supply customers with leading-edge technology, support and services. Both of these bellwether technology companies share the common goal of providing their customers with solutions that:

• Lower capital and operational expenses and spur innovation

• Adapt and scale along with the business needs

• Enable IT departments and end users to protect, access and efficiently virtualize and store data

• Protect/secure critical data

• Are easy to maintain and manage

• Are based on industry standards

• Integrate and interoperate with the existing infrastructure

• Enable quick recovery from man-made or natural disaster outages

• Allow IT departments and end users to readily access corporate data

• Drive new levels of efficiency via virtualization consolidation and management

• Improve network uptime, reliability and availability to 99.99% or 99.999%

• Consolidate and save physical space

• Lower utility costs and reduce organizations’ carbon footprint

The Dell 12th Generation PowerEdge servers address a wide range of usage scenarios and price points. Dell also utilizes a consistent set of processors across all servers in the same generation regardless of packaging. This enables businesses to deploy a common set of system images and drivers. The Dell 12th Generation PowerEdge servers feature expanded memory and I/O and utilize Intel Xeon processors to deliver exceptional virtualization performance.

The Dell 12th Generation PowerEdge servers have the potential to deliver up to 168% faster performance than previous-generation servers, according to internal Dell benchmark test figures. Actual performance gains will vary depending on individual user configurations, workloads and application environments.

Top-notch technical service and support is also an important consideration when it comes to choosing servers, and both Dell and Intel have a consistent track record in this crucial area. This is reinforced by their long-term committed partnership, which ensures integration and interoper-ability between the server hardware and underlying processors for optimized performance. The Intel Xeon E5 processors bring consistent performance to the Dell 12th Generation servers and deliver backward and forward compatibility. The synergies between Dell servers and Intel pro-cessors allow customers to achieve average performance gains and reduced power consumption


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compared with prior models. The Intel Xeon Processor E5 family can support up to eight physi-cal/16 logical cores in one-, two- and four-processor configurations. SMBs that lack sufficient IT expertise also have the option of engaging Dell’s ProConsult Virtualization and Storage Services group to assist in choosing the correct configuration and accelerate deployment.

In order to maximize their investment in existing equipment with an eye toward the future, SMBs should assess their current environment and construct a virtualization plan that anticipates server needs for the next two, three or even five years.

UserCommentsDell’s PowerEdge servers have a well-deserved reputation for high performance and reliability. Dell PowerEdge Servers received high marks for performance, reliability and uptime in ITIC’s 2011 Global Server Hardware and Database Reliability Survey, which polled 450 users in October 2011. Nearly three-quarters, or 73%, of those polled indicated they “rarely” experienced server hardware failures on their Dell PowerEdge servers, and a 69% majority of respondents rated the uptime and reliability of the Dell PowerEdge servers as “excellent.” These were among the highest ratings of any of the 11 server hardware platforms in the survey.

An 85% majority of respondents to the ITIC survey gave Dell “excellent,” “very good” or “good” ratings for technical service, support and product warranties. None of the survey participants rated Dell’s technical service and support “unsatisfactory.” Additionally, 94% of the respondents indicated their intent to continue on the PowerEdge platform and upgrade to the new 12th Generation family of PowerEdge servers. Of that number, 23% said they planned to purchase the 12th Generation PowerEdge models within the first three months of their release.

The vice president of IT at a Midwestern bank with 30 servers said that his financial institution has used Dell PowerEdge servers exclusively since 2001 and appreciates the high reliability and trouble-free maintenance. He gave the Dell PowerEdge servers an “excellent” reliability rating and estimated that the total amount of downtime due to inherent hardware problems (disk or hard drive failure, memory corruption, power supply failure, RAID failure, CPU or motherboard issues, etc.) was six to 10 minutes per server per year.

“We’ve been using Dell PowerEdge servers since 2001, and other than a couple of [problems] with power supplies and hard drives, we’ve have had very little issue with them. Dell technical support has been very good,” the vice president of IT said.

“Dell PowerEdge servers just work,” said an IT manager at a college in the Northeast with 50 servers, who also rated the uptime and reliability of the PowerEdge hardware as “excellent.” The manager noted that the college “rarely experiences server hardware failures, which is crucial, since our college requires four nines, or 99.99%, server and application availability.”

ConclusionsIn summary, organizations have a wide, often confusing array of server hardware choices. The business needs should always dictate the technology choice and not vice versa. To select the most appropriate server and configuration for your business, assess and review the applications your servers will support now and over the next two to three years.


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Is your business growing rapidly? Are you adding more data-intensive applications? Are your storage needs increasing exponentially? These are all questions that SMBs must ask as they shop for servers.

Organization must assess the needs of their workforce as well as increases in the number and size of applications. A company whose head count remains static may still experience significant year-over-year increases in server capacity/memory needs and storage requirements. Planned virtualization and cloud computing deployments will also influence the choice of server. And all organizations, irrespective of size or vertical market, need to bolster security.

Executives and IT staff should confer on the needs of the current infrastructure, estimate how the business and technology needs will change and grow over the next two to three years and base their server purchasing decisions on those assessments.

Businesses that fail to invest in their server infrastructure will almost certainly fail. Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish. Companies should plan for the future by purchasing the most robust server configuration that they can afford.

Investing in the latest Dell 12th Generation PowerEdge servers powered by the new Intel Xeon Processor E5 family will give SMBs a solid foundation to support the increasing demands placed on the network by virtualization, storage and cloud computing environments — at competitive price points to fit every budget.

The combination of Dell 12th Generation PowerEdge servers and the Intel Xeon Processor E5 family will allow businesses to architect their network infrastructure to address rapid technology and business changes. It will enable organizations to upgrade to new, often complex technolo-gies with minimal disruption to the existing environment and scale as business needs dictate. The Dell 12th Generation PowerEdge servers equipped with the Intel Xeon Processor E5 family provide the highest levels of availability — 99.99% and 99.999% uptime — the equivalent of 52 minutes or 5.25 minutes of downtime per server per year, respectively.

Dell Intel Server Review Guide

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Dell Intel Server Review Guide