New PowerEdge T150 Overview
Download PDFTue, 17 Jan 2023 08:06:43 -0000
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Summary
After nearly three years, Dell Technologies has released the new PowerEdge T150 the entry level 1S tower server designed to power value workloads and applications for budget-conscious customers 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 T150, 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 tower server.
Market Positioning
The PowerEdge T150 was designed to be the most economical entry within the single-socket 1U PowerEdge tower server space. Small businesses requiring the most affordable tower 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.
In addition to being the lowest-cost PowerEdge tower server, the T150s diminutive footprint presents another value proposition – it is also the smallest PowerEdge tower offering at 14.17H x 6.89W x
17.9D (28.6 Liters). Customers seeking to occupy tight spaces in their Edge or ROBO environments can benefit from this small form factor to utilize every bit of space available. In layman’s terms, the T150 can be deployed where most other towers cannot. Regardless of where deployed – the PowerEdge T150 delivers new levels of performance, flexibility and affordability that will help drive both business and organizational success to SMB 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 T140.
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 up to four 2.5”/3.5” SATA/SAS 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 SW/HW RAID solutions, and can be mapped to add-in cards such as the S150, H345/H355, H745/H755 and HBA355i.
I/O
Another major improvement is newly added support for one slot 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 T150 – both the 300W AC Cabled Bronze and 400W AC Cabled PSU are supported offerings. 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 tower dimensions are identical to the previous-gen PowerEdge T140, with dimensions of
14.17”H x 6.89”W x 17.9”D. The maximum weight with all drives populated is extremely light, at
11.68kg (or 25.74lb), allowing for easy relocation. Lastly, the acoustics were tailored to be most fitting for quiet environments, such as on a desk around a seated user’s head height, coming in at 25dBA for each work case, so any noise created is practically inaudible in office environments. These various chassis measurements are ideal for storefront, office and ROBO locations.
Figure 1 – Side angle of the sleek, new PowerEdge T150
Simple and Intuitive Systems Management
Managing the PowerEdge T150 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, giving small businesses more flexibility to allocate limited resources elsewhere.
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 T150 was designed to accommodate budget-conscious customers looking for the lowest-cost PowerEdge tower server. By trading non-critical features, such as hot-plug and redundancy support, for a reduced total cost, the baseline price of the T150 is significantly less than the baseline T350 that offers these enterprise features. This positions the PowerEdge T150 as our most affordable tower server solution - perfect for a small business that doesn’t yet need enterprise class hardware features or the ability to scale workloads.
Having office-friendly sizing and acoustics, the T150 can be deployed at virtually any location. Whether that be at Near/Mid Edge sites or within ROBO environments, the T150 brings new levels of performance, flexibility and affordability that help grow small businesses. Some common workloads that are powered by the PowerEdge T150 include filing, printing, mailing, messaging, billing, and collaboration/sharing.
Please keep in mind that the PowerEdge T150 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 T350 tower server instead.
Conclusion
The PowerEdge T150 has been crafted to be Dell Technologies most cost-effective PowerEdge tower 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 T150 the perfect solution for small businesses looking to invest in an entry-level tower server for their business needs.
Related Documents
Top 5 Reasons to Migrate to the PowerEdge T550 from the Previous-Generation T440 and T640
Tue, 17 Jan 2023 08:25:05 -0000
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Summary
The Dell EMC PowerEdge T550 is the next-generation performance mainstream tower by Dell Technologies. By consolidating the most valuable features from the previous-generation T440 and T640, the T550 is offered as the successor intended to run performance use cases and workloads in medium businesses, Edge, ROBO and enterprise data centers. This DfD will inform readers on how decision making led to merging the T440 and T640 into the T550, as well as give five top reasons why customers will be excited to transition over to this new powerhouse - the T550.
Merging the T440 and T640
Development of the PowerEdge T550 heavily focused on aligning what it would offer to what customers actually used in ROBO, Edge, SMB, and enterprise datacenter environments. Sales data from the previous-generation T440 and T640 were often used to navigate decision-making and generally pointed to a clear, general consensus. A few examples are below:
- GPU attach rates on the more-capable T640 were rarely populated in full, resulting in under-utilized space
- Specific desirable features in the T640, such as NVMe support, were not present in the T440
- Top bin CPU support was not present in the T440
These observations allowed engineering to refine what the next performance mainstream PowerEdge tower would look like. By eliminating the less desirable features and keeping the most valuable ones, the T550 has essentially merged both of its predecessors into a handcrafted, next-generation powerhouse. The remainder of this DfD will highlight the top five reasons why we believe our customers will benefit from transitioning over to the T550, a few of which are direct results from the merger.
*Please note that the T640 lifecycle is extended to mid-2022 for customers who choose to stay on 2nd Generation Xeon®, and the T440 lifecycle is extended until mid-2023 for customers who choose to bridge from 2nd Generation Xeon® to 4th Generation Xeon®
Figure 1 – Side angle of the sleek, new PowerEdge T550
Five Most Valuable Impacts
3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors
The 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor family was designed to generate higher productivity and operational efficiency for dense workloads, such as AI, ML/DL and HPC. In addition to full-stack support for the T550, various architectural design refinements have returned significant performance improvements across multiple benchmarks, including:
- SPECrate 2017 (a throughput measurement metric) observed a 57.1% performance improvement for Floating Point when compared to 2nd Generation Xeon, as published here
- SPECspeed 2017 (a time-based measurement metric) observed a 50.3% performance improvement for Floating Point when compared to 2nd Generation Xeon, as published here
- Gen-on-Gen performance improvement average of 1.46x, as observed by Intel
Top-of-the-line features are integrated into 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable CPUs to give users more functionality. Enhanced Speed Select Technology (SST) functionalities, including base frequency, core power, and turbo frequency, offers a finer control over CPU performance for cost optimization. Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) offers maximum privacy and protection by encrypting sections of memory to create highly secured environments to store sensitive data.
3200 MT/s Memory Speed
Memory speeds have risen by 20% over the previous-generation T440 and T640, increasing from 2666 MT/s to 3200 MT/s. Additionally, the number of supported memory slots has jumped from 6 to 8 – a 33% increase in DIMM capacity. Allowing more data to be stored in memory, with faster DIMM speeds, will significantly reduce data transfer times for memory-intensive workloads like databases, CRM, ERP, or Exchange.
PowerEdge Enterprise Features
The PowerEdge advantage lies within the robust environment offered to enterprise customers. The PowerEdge Raid Controller 11 (PERC11) now provides NVMe HW RAID, granting users the ability to back up data from their most powerful storage devices. In addition to hard drives, fans, PSUs, and Internal Dual SD Modules (IDSDM), hot-plug support is now also offered for front access BOSS (2x M.2 internal), allowing the server to keep running when a critical component swap is needed. Even the T550s smaller form factor (10% less volume than T440 and 15% less volume than T640) now allows GPUs to be used in tower format, so that max performance can be achieved whether in the datacenter or in the office closet.
Legacy Boot support has been deprecated by Intel and replaced with the superior UEFI Secure Boot (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), which has better programmability, greater scalability, and higher security. UEFI Secure Boot also provides faster booting times and support for 9ZB, while legacy BIOS is limited to 2.2TB boot drives. Lastly, although not a newly supported feature, customers can continue to optimize server management with iDRAC9 (Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller), which provides administrators with an abundance of server operation information to a dashboard screen that can be remotely accessed and managed. Countless operational conditions are always monitored, giving small businesses more flexibility to allocate limited resources and manpower elsewhere.
PCIe Gen4
Support for five slots of PCIe Gen4, the fourth iteration of the PCIe standard, is now included. 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 PCIe devices to CPU. This feature will be extremely effective for customers adopting dense components, like NVMe drives or GPUs.
MVP (Most Valuable Peripherals)
Decision making for peripheral support came as a direct result from the T440 and T640 merger. Sales data indicated what customers valued most, and the T550 achieved a perfectly balanced blend of storage, PCIe and GPU capability. To begin, the number of storage devices supported was met in the middle, with availability for up to 24x SAS/SATA drives (T440 maxed out at 16x, and the T640 maxed out at 32x). This also includes NVMe drives support, with the inclusion of an 8x SAS/SATA + 8x NVMe configuration! *Note that customers seeking 32x SAS/SATA drives can still leverage the T640 tower until mid-2022, or R740xd2 rack if that is a better suited solution.
The number of PCIe slots were also blended, with five slots available for x16 PCIe Gen4, and one slot available for x8 PCIe Gen3. This is a great compromise, as customers will still be receiving more total lanes (88 lanes on T550 vs. 64 lanes on T640). Lastly, after observing low GPU attach rates on the T640, the T550 offers up to 2x DW or 5x SW GPUs – a much more accurate representation of what customers have been using for AI/HPC workload support. The latest and greatest GPU models are now supported, including the NVIDIA T4, A10, A30 and A40. Lastly, NVLink bridging can now be utilized to create a high-bandwidth link between compatible GPUs! This will drive performance for workloads like databases, virtualization, and medium duty AI/ML.
Performance Comparison
Dell Technologies commissioned Grid Dynamics to validate the performance uplift for various T550 use cases when compared to the previous-generation T640. Figures 2-4 below illustrate just a few examples of the boosted performance seen on the T550. The full whitepaper can be seen here.
Figure 2 – I/O operations comparison for processing the same amount of retail video streams. The T550 does I/O writing 26.26% faster than T640.
Figure 3 – Comparison of time spent to train an ML model depending on the number of SKUs for retail inventory decision making. The T550 uses 25.77% less time to train the ML model than T640.
Figure 4 – Comparison of transactions committing speed when measuring database-related operations over a VM. The speed of transaction commits is 19.8% higher on the T550 compared to T640.
Final Words
The PowerEdge T550 has been handcrafted to offer a wide array of customers the most valuable features and support for performance workloads such as data analytic, virtualization, and medium duty AI/ML, in addition to more mainstream workloads such as collaboration, database, and CRM.
New PowerEdge R250 Overview
Tue, 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.