Dell’s new server offering is the PowerEdge R510, a sleek and compact unit that fits a lot of muscle into a small space. Despite its size, the PowerEdge R510 is fast, furious and, perhaps most importantly, flexible. Dell designed it with the idea of satisfying as many different application needs as possible, from small and medium-sized businesses to large corporate environments…
Posts Tagged ‘server hardware’
INetU Labs takes on the Dell MD3000i: Is it an Enterprise-capable workgroup SAN?
Recently INetU Labs put Dell’s low cost workgroup SAN through its paces to see how it compares to the more robust (and costly) Equallogic and EMC offerings. The results are in, and it seems that correctly configured, the MD3000i is great product with plenty of bang for your buck.
Configuration
For testing we used an MD3000i populated with a mix of 146GB SAS and 500GB SATA drives. The SAN shipped with a single controller but a second was added to test failover. A word of warning here – Dell configures the duplex mode based on how the SAN is ordered; if you add a second controller later you’ll need to use the command line tool to enable it, a process that’s not stated as a clear requirement and takes a little digging on the Internet to find documentation for. That being said, once you find the docs you’ll have it set in no time. Our test unit was a major firmware revision behind, and bringing it up to date took a good twenty minutes. Minor revision updates probably won’t take as long, but this is something to keep in mind if you’re striving for multiple nines of availability.
Once the hardware was configured and updated, the software install was a snap. The management software is somewhat cumbersome but gets the job done, and configuring the LUNs is a simple process. We were testing multipath (MPIO), and Dell requires a specific version of the iSCSI initiator on Windows servers, so be careful here, too. Fortunately, the supplied driver CD made sure the right version was installed.
Benchmarking
Sleek, sexy… oh, and actually a really good server: Dell’s R710 added to INetU’s Sales Offering
INetU has recently become one of the first web hosts to add the Dell PowerEdge R710 to our Sales Offering. The R710 is part of Dell’s new line of 11th generation servers.
I love being part of the team that previews new hardware to add to our standard offering, and I’m very excited that we’ve become an early adopter of the R710. Of course we use a very high-tech method for selecting devices to sell:
If it looks cool, USE IT! 
And these do! Really cool! Check out the sleekest, sexiest Dell server to date.
But all joking aside, Dell has really stepped up their game in design engineering. They listened to the feedback from customers and users to engineer a really solid offering. Here are some of the reasons that we knew we needed to add the R710 to our arsenal:
Which RAID Level Do I Need?
There are many RAID levels to choose from, and it can be helpful to know how the levels differ. While RAID-1 and RAID-5 are probably the most well-known, other common levels include: RAID-0, RAID-6, and RAID-10. Here’s a rundown of these levels and what they offer:
RAID-0 combines two or more disks to increase performance and capacity, but there is no fault tolerance. A single disk failure will result in the loss of all data on the array. RAID-0 can be useful when fault tolerance is not necessary and a high value cost/performance balance is required.
RAID-1 is most often deployed with two disks. The disks are mirrored – providing fault tolerance. Read performance is increased while write performance will be similar to a single disk – if not less. A single disk failure can be sustained without data loss. RAID-1 is often used when fault tolerance is key and there isn’t an exceptional space or performance requirement.
RAID-5 provides fault tolerance and increased read performance – though write performance often suffers. A minimum of 3 disks are required. RAID-5 can sustain the loss of a single disk. In the event of a disk failure, the data from the failed disk is reconstructed from parity striped across the remaining disks. Due to this, both read and write performance is severely impacted while a RAID-5 array is in a degraded state. RAID-5 is ideal when space and cost more important than performance.
