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

• 3^rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors

 The 3^rd 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 2^nd Generation Xeon, as published here
• SPECspeed 2017 (a time-based measurement metric) observed a 50.3% performance improvement for Floating Point when compared to 2^nd 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 3^rd 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.