New PowerEdge R350 Overview
Download PDFTue, 17 Jan 2023 07:50:02 -0000
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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.