New PowerEdge R250 Overview
Download PDFTue, 17 Jan 2023 07:59:12 -0000
|Read Time: 0 minutes
Summary
After nearly three years, Dell Technologies has released the new PowerEdge R250 - an entry level 1S rack server designed to power value workloads and applications for budget-conscious users that prioritize reduced costs over expanded feature sets. This DfD was written to inform readers on what new capabilities they can expect from the PowerEdge R250, including coverage of the product features, systems management, security, and value proposition explaining which use cases are best suited for small businesses looking to invest in this value rack server.
Market Positioning
The PowerEdge R250 was designed to be the most economical entry within the single-socket 1U PowerEdge rack server space. Small businesses requiring the most affordable rack server, while still receiving the enterprise features and high-quality experience that the PowerEdge brand is known for, will gain the most from this offering.
The standard-depth form factor and low acoustic footprint makes the R250 a perfect solution for storefront and ROBO locations, as it fits in most small spaces and is inaudible to those nearby. Customers intending to use this in enterprise data centers or near-Edge facilities can also utilize the small form factor to occupy small spaces within dedicated hosting racks or equipment closets. Regardless of where deployed – the PowerEdge R250 delivers new levels of performance, flexibility and affordability that will help drive both business and organizational success to budget-conscious customers.
Expanded Product Features
Intel® Xeon® E-2300 Processors
Perhaps the most notable hardware addition to the PowerEdge T150 is the inclusion of Intel’s latest Xeon® E-2300 processor family. This uses the Cypress Cove CPU microarchitecture; offering a 19% increase of IPC (instructions per cycle) while also increasing IGP cores, L1 cache speeds and L2 cache speeds, when compared to previous generation Xeon® E-2200 processors. These performance increases, in tangent with other new features listed below, allow for up to 28% faster IO speeds when compared to the previous generation PowerEdge R240.
Memory
Memory capabilities have vastly improved, with the latest Xeon® E- series memory controllers now supporting up to four DDR4 UDIMMs at 3200MT/s (a 20% increase over the previous generation). The supported DIMM capacity has also doubled from 16GB to 32GB. Having twice as much data stored in faster DIMMs will significantly reduce data transfer times, resulting in increased productivity.
Storage/RAID
Support for four cabled or hot-plug 3.5” HDD/SSD drives is offered. Additionally, vSAS (Value SAS) SSD support has been expanded to provide more options to further offer an affordable, performance SSD tier. Drives can be configured with Dell Technologies BOSS-S1 and PERC HW RAID solutions, and can be mapped to add-in cards options such as the S150, H345/H355, H745/H755 and HBA355i.
I/O
Another major improvement is newly added support for two slots of PCIe Gen4 - the fourth iteration of the PCIe standard. Compared to PCIe Gen3, the throughput per lane doubles from 8GT/s to 16GT/s, effectively cutting transfer times in half for data traveling from storage to CPU.
Power/Cooling
Only one power supply unit is required to run the power-optimized PowerEdge R250. This PSU has been upgraded from a 250W AC Cabled Bronze PSU to a 450W AC Cabled Bronze PSU. Four non-hot swap fans reside in the middle of the chassis to cool the components that generate the most heat – a design intent focusing on power and cooling optimization.
Manageability (Size, Weight and Acoustics)
The rack dimensions are marginally smaller than the previous-gen PowerEdge R240, with dimensions of 42.8mm (H) x 534.59mm (W) x 434mm (D). The maximum weight with all drives populated is extremely light, at 12.48kg (or 27.51lb), allowing for effortless deployment. Lastly, the acoustical output has a wide range, between 22db for entry-level configurations operations at idle conditions and 46db for feature-rich configurations operating at max performance conditions. More often than not, acoustics will fall in line with the quieter, office-friendly range. However, if this is not the case, customers can ensure office-friendly acoustics by keeping ambient floor temperatures at 230 C. These various chassis measurements make the R250 ideal for storefront, office and ROBO locations.
Figure 1 – Side angle of the sleek, new PowerEdge R250
Simple and Intuitive Systems Management
Managing the PowerEdge R250 is simple and intuitive with the Dell integrated systems management tool – iDRAC9 (Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller). iDRAC9 is a hardware device containing its own processor, memory and network interface that provides administrators with an abundance of server operation information to a dashboard screen that can be remotely accessed and managed. Operational conditions such as temperatures, fan speeds, chassis alarms, power supplies, RAID status and individual disk status are always monitored so businesses will have the flexibility to allocate limited resources to where they are most needed.
Exceptional Security
Legacy Boot support has been deprecated by Intel® and replaced with the superior UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) Secure Boot, which has better programmability, greater scalability, and higher security. UEFI Secure Boot also provides faster booting times and support for 9ZBs, while legacy BIOS is limited to 2.2TB boot drives. Customers who purchase the latest Xeon® E-2300 processors will also inherit Intel SGX (Software Guard Extensions) baked into their CPUs. SGX security provides maximum protection by encrypting sections of memory to create highly secured environments to store sensitive data. This feature is an instrumental security feature for Edge customers that consistently transfer data between the cloud and the client.
Recommended Use Cases
The PowerEdge R250 was designed to accommodate budget-conscious customers looking for the lowest-cost PowerEdge rack server. By trading non-critical features, such as hot-plug and redundancy support, for a reduced total cost, the price of the baseline R250 is ~50% less than the baseline R350 that offers these enterprise features. This positions the PowerEdge R250 as our most affordable rack server solution - perfect for a small business that has no need for enterprise class hardware features or the ability to scale workloads.
With a standard-depth 1U chassis and low acoustical output, the R250 can be deployed at virtually any location. Whether that be an enterprise data center, near/mid Edge site, or inside the closet just down the hall, the R250 brings new levels of performance, efficiency and versatility that help grow small businesses. Some common workloads that are powered by the PowerEdge R250 include traditional business applications (filing, printing, mailing, messaging, billing), virtualization, private cloud, and collaboration/sharing.
Please keep in mind that the PowerEdge R250 was designed to value affordability over feature- richness, resulting in the removal of some features/support (to reduce cost) that may be valuable for customers intending to scale their workloads. Small businesses that value enterprise-class features, or intend to scale their workloads, should strongly consider investing in the PowerEdge R350 rack server.
Conclusion
The PowerEdge R250 has been crafted to be Dell Technologies most cost-effective PowerEdge rack server offering. By only including the most critical features a small business would need, budget conscious customers can have the high-quality experience that the PowerEdge brand is known for at the most affordable price-point. The PowerEdge R250 is the perfect solution for small businesses looking to invest in an entry-level rackmount server for their business needs.
Related Documents
New PowerEdge R350 Overview
Tue, 17 Jan 2023 07:50:02 -0000
|Read Time: 0 minutes
Summary
After nearly three years, Dell Technologies has released the new PowerEdge R350, a mainstream, scalable 1S rack server designed to power and scale value workloads and applications at a low price that provides customers optimal balance of useful enterprise features and affordability. This DfD describes the new capabilities you can expect from the PowerEdge R350, including coverage of the product features, systems management, security, and value proposition explaining which use cases are best suited for small businesses looking to invest in this mainstream rack server.
Market Positioning
The PowerEdge R350 was designed to be the mainstream entry within the single-socket 1U PowerEdge rack server space. With more storage support and enterprise features, such as hot swap and redundancy, the PowerEdge R350 is a scalable solution capable of expansion while remaining affordable. Small businesses seeking an affordable rack server that is capable of scaling to tackle enterprise- class workloads will benefit the most from this solution.
The standard-depth form factor and low acoustic footprint make the R350 a perfect solution for storefront and near-Edge locations, as it fits in most small spaces and is inaudible to those nearby. Customers intending to use this in enterprise data centers or near-Edge facilities can also fill small spaces within dedicated hosting racks or equipment closets. Regardless of where deployed, the PowerEdge R350 delivers new levels of performance, efficiency, and scalability to small businesses requiring enterprise features for their server environment.
Expanded Product Features
Intel® Xeon® E-2300 Processors
Perhaps the most notable hardware addition to the PowerEdge R350 is the inclusion of the latest Intel Xeon® E-2300 processor family. This uses the Cypress Cove CPU microarchitecture, offering a 19% increase of IPC (instructions per cycle) while also increasing IGP cores, L1 cache speeds, and L2 cache speeds, when compared to previous-generation Xeon® E-2200 processors. These performance increases, in tangent with the other new features listed below, allow for up to 28% faster IO speeds when compared to the previous- generation PowerEdge R340.
Memory
Memory capabilities have vastly improved, with the latest Xeon® E- series memory controllers now supporting up to four DDR4 UDIMMs at 3200 MT/s (a 20% increase over the previous generation). The supported DIMM capacity has also doubled from 16 GB to 32 GB. Having twice as much data stored in faster DIMMs will significantly reduce data transfer times, resulting in increased productivity.
Storage/RAID
Support for eight hot-plug 2.5”/3.5” HDD/SSD drives is offered. Value SAS (vSAS) SSD support has also been expanded to provide more options to further offer an affordable, performance SSD tier. These drives can be configured with Dell PERC HW RAID, and can be mapped to add-in card options such as the S150, H345/H355, H745/H755 and HBA355i.
Also, the R350 introduces support for the hot-plug Boot Optimized Storage Solution 2.0 (BOSS 2.0) accessibility for two M.2 drives at the front of the server with its own dedicated slot. This allows for the surprise removal of these M.2 drives so that the server does not need to be taken offline in case of any SSD failure. This feature, in tangent with two times as much drive support, are big differentiators that distinctly position the R350 over the R250 as the better rack solution for small businesses that require a scalable server optimized for enterprise-class workloads.
I/O
Another major improvement is newly added support for two slots of PCIe Gen4, the fourth iteration of the PCIe standard. Compared to PCIe Gen3, the throughput per lane doubles from 8 GT/s to 16 GT/s, effectively cutting transfer times in half for data traveling from storage to CPU.
Power and Cooling
Only one power supply unit is required to run the power-optimized PowerEdge R350. This PSU has been upgraded from a 350W AC Cabled Bronze PSU to a 600W AC Redundant Platinum PSU. Four non-hot swap fans reside in the middle of the chassis to cool the components that generate the most heat—a design intent focused on optimizing the power and cooling budget.
Manageability (Size, Weight, and Acoustics)
The rack dimensions are marginally larger than the PowerEdge R250, with dimensions of 42.8 mm (H) x 563 mm (W) x 512.5 mm (D) for the 4x 3.5” chassis, and 42.8 mm (H) x 483.9 mm
(W) x 534.6 mm (D) for the x 2.5” chassis. The maximum weight with all drives populated is considerably light, at 13.6 kg (or 29.98 lb) for 4x 3.5” drives and 36.3 kg (or 80.02 lb) for 8x 2.5” drives, allowing for easy deployment. Lastly, the acoustical output has a wide range, between 35 db for entry-level configurations operations at idle conditions and 63 db for feature-rich configurations operating at max performance conditions. In most operating conditions, customers can ensure office-friendly acoustics by keeping ambient floor temperatures at 230 C, but should keep in mind that when working at full power, the server may still be audible to nearby persons. These manageability measurements make the R350 ideal for labs, schools, restaurants, open office spaces, ROBO or Edge, and small, ventilated closets.
Figure 1 – Side angle of the sleek, new PowerEdge R350
Simple and Intuitive Systems Management
Managing the PowerEdge R350 is simple and intuitive with the Dell integrated systems management tool, the Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller 9 (iDRAC9). iDRAC9 is a hardware device containing its own processor, memory, and network interface that provides administrators with an abundance of server operation information to a dashboard screen that can be remotely accessed and managed. Operational conditions such as temperatures, fan speeds, chassis alarms, power supplies, RAID status, and individual disk status are always monitored so businesses have the flexibility to allocate limited resources to where they are most needed.
Exceptional Security
Legacy Boot support has been deprecated by Intel® and replaced with the superior Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Secure Boot, which has better programmability, greater scalability, and higher security. UEFI Secure Boot also provides faster booting times and support for 9ZBs, while legacy BIOS is limited to 2.2 TB boot drives. Customers who purchase the latest Xeon® E-2300 processors will also inherit Intel SGX (Software Guard Extensions) designed into their CPUs. SGX security provides maximum protection by encrypting sections of memory to create highly secured environments to store sensitive data. This feature is an instrumental security feature for Edge customers that consistently transfer data between the cloud and the client.
Performance
Dell Technologies ran internal testing comparing the R350 and R340 SPECrate® 2017_int_base results, which measures the ability to process identical programs on each of its available threads in parallel (throughput). The configurations were identical with the processor being the independent variable. The PowerEdge R350 used the latest Intel® Xeon® E-2300 processors, while the older PowerEdge R340 used Intel® Xeon® E-2200 processors. As seen in Figure 2 below, each processor bin from top to bottom saw performance increases ranging from 12.2% to 33.2%. Find more information about these studies here.
Figure 2 –SPECrate® 2017_int_base results for R350 CPUs (blue) vs. R340 CPUs (gray)
Recommended Use Cases
The PowerEdge R350 was designed to accommodate customers looking for an affordable, yet scalable, rackmount server. With support for up to eight drives and enterprise-class features, such as hot-swap BOSS and PSU redundancy, the R350 will best accommodate small businesses that desire scalability and the capability to tackle more data intensive applications. Some common workloads that are powered by the PowerEdge R350 include traditional business applications (filing, printing, mailing, messaging, billing), virtualization, data processing, video surveillance, private cloud, and collaboration or sharing.
Please keep in mind that the PowerEdge R350 was designed to value scalability and feature richness over affordability, resulting in a slight cost premium when compared to the PowerEdge R250. Small businesses that are looking for the lowest-cost, entry-level PowerEdge rackmount server should strongly consider investing in the PowerEdge R250 rack server.
Conclusion
The PowerEdge R350 has been crafted to be Dell Technologies mainstream entry within the single-socket 1U PowerEdge rack server space. With the inclusion of useful enterprise features and twice as much storage as the R250, small business customers can tackle more data-intensive workloads and scale out their solution as needed, all while at an affordable price point.
Accelerate Genomics Insights and Discovery with High-Performing, Scalable Architecture from Dell and Intel
Thu, 05 Oct 2023 19:52:19 -0000
|Read Time: 0 minutes
Summary
The field of genomics requires the storage and processing of vast amounts of data. In this brief, Intel and Dell technologists discuss key considerations to successfully deploy BeeGFS based storage for genomics applications on the 16th Generation PowerEdge Server portfolio offerings.
Market positioning
The life sciences industry faces intense pressure to accelerate results and bring new treatments to market while lowering costs, especially in genomics. But life-changing discoveries often depend on processing, storing, and analyzing enormous volumes of genomic sequencing data — more than 20 TB of new data per day by one organization alone[1], with each modern genome sequencer producing up to 10TB of new data per day. Researchers need high-performing solutions built to handle this volume of data, in addition to demanding analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, and that are also easy to deploy and scale.
Dell and Intel have collaborated on a bill of materials (BoM) that provides life science organizations with a scalable solution for genomics. This solution features high-performance compute and storage building blocks for one of the leading parallel cluster file systems, BeeGFS. The BoM features four Dell PowerEdge rack server nodes powered by 4th Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, which deliver the performance needed for faster results and time to production.
The BoM can be tailored for each organization’s architectural needs. For dense configurations, customers can use the Dell PowerEdge C6600 enclosure with PowerEdge C6620 server nodes instead of standard PowerEdge R660 servers (each PowerEdge C6600 chassis can hold up to four PowerEdge C6620 server nodes). If they already have a storage solution in place using InfiniBand fabric, the nodes can be equipped with an additional Mellanox ConnectX-6 HDR100 InfiniBand adapter.
Key Considerations
Key considerations for deploying genomics solutions on Dell PowerEdge servers include:
- Core count: Life sciences organizations often process a whole genome on a cluster, which scales linearly with core count. The Dell PowerEdge solution offers up to 32 cores per CPU to meet performance requirements.
- Memory requirements: This BoM provides 512 GB of DRAM to support specific tasks in workloads that have higher memory requirements, such as running Burrows-Wheeler Aligner algorithms.
- Local and distributed storage: Input/output (I/O) is a big consideration for genomics workloads because datasets can reach hundreds of gigabytes in size. Dell and Intel recommend 3.2 TB of local storage specifically for commonly used genomics tools that read and write many temporary files.
Available Configurations
Feature | Configuration |
Platform | 4 x Dell R660 supporting 8 x 2.5” NVMe drives - direct connection |
CPU (per server) | 2x Xeon Gold 6438Y+ (32c @ 2.0GHz) |
DRAM | 512GB (16 x 32GB DDR5-4800) |
Boot device | Dell BOSS-N1 with 2x 480GB M.2 NVMe SSD (RAID1) |
Storage | 1x 3.2TB Solidigm D7-P5620 SSD (PCIe Gen4, Mixed-use) |
Capacity storage | Dell Ready Solutions for HPC BeeGFS Storage: 500 GB capacity per 30x coverage whole genome sequence (WGS) to be processed; 800 MB/s total (200 MB/s per node). |
NIC | Intel E810-XXV Dual Port 10/25GbE SFP28, OCP NIC 3.0 |
Learn More
Contact your Dell or Intel account team for a customized quote at 1-877-289-3355.
Intel Select Solutions for Genomics Analysis: https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/solution-briefs/select-genomics-analytics.pdf
Dell HPC Ready Architecture for Genomics: https://infohub.delltechnologies.com/static/media/6cb85249-c458-4c06-bcec-ef35c1a363ca.pdf?dgc=SM&cid=1117&lid=spr4502976221&linkId=112053582
Dell Ready Solutions for HPC BeeGFS Storage: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000130963/dell-emc-ready-solutions-for-hpc-beegfs-high-performance-storage
[1] Broad Institute. “Sharing Data and Tools to Enable Discovery” https://www.broadinstitute.org/sharing-data-and-tools/cloud-computing#top.