Dell PowerEdge R815 review

AMD’s launch of its Opteron 6100 processors throws the gauntlet down to Intel as it aims to remove the price barrier that has traditionally held SMBs back from moving up to 4-socket systems.

Intel’s Xeon 7500 processors certainly deliver a host of features and a massive core count but as we’ve seen in our exclusive reviews of IBM’s System x3850 X5 and Fujitsu’s Primergy RX600 S5, their price point puts them way beyond the means of the majority of SMBs.

Dell is making a habit of delivering new server technology to market ahead of the competition and it does it yet again with the PowerEdge R815 as this is the first commercially available Opteron 6100 server. Our review system came supplied with a quartet of the latest 12-Core Opteron 6174 modules and its comparatively low price tag makes it a strong contender for cost-conscious businesses looking to improve their rack density.

The R815 shares the same behavioural design concept offered by all the latest PowerEdge servers. The use of many similar components means that if your support staff know how to service one PowerEdge server then most components should be easily recognisable on all other models.

In fact, this server takes many features from the higher-end PowerEdge R810 which we exclusively reviewed in our sister title,PC Pro. It comprises the same 2U rack chassis where the front panel is split into two sections horizontally with the lower half providing a clear air flow through the chassis.

You have six hot-swap SFF disk bays in the upper half of the front panel and Dell offers a choice of SATA, SAS and SDD drives. The review system looks even better value as it included a quintet of 147GB 6Gb/sec SAS SFF hard disks plus Dell’s PERC H700 RAID card.