We got in some new servers at work, this been the Dell R900 4U Servers and what peaked my interest was the fact that this servers comes with 2x 6 core Xeon CPU’s – that’s 12 Cores of 2.4Ghz Power. It is easy sometimes to forget what is going on in the server / business world when sitting at home and looking at awe at the 8 Core (2 x 4) Mac Pro or the new 6 Core I7 CPU. This post is just to serve as a means to show you what you can get, this is for a box that might run 12 virtual servers and maybe not quite suited to playing the latest games (the noise would annoy you too much anyhow – its like a jet taking off).
CPU
First this server can take FOUR six-core Xeon processors – running at 2.6Ghz each. What we have here folks is 24 core box that can take out any Mac Pro that may come along – yes that is no doubting some serious number crunching ability.
Memory
It can take up to 128GIG ram – combine this with your 24 Cores and we agree it can run a whole bunch of Virtual machines while taking up only one space in the rack.
Hard Drives
Let us add to this 15K RPM SAS Drives in a RAID configuration – this will stop any bottle neck that might be caused by slow 7200 RPM Drives. The goal of this server is not to serve out 100TB of data. you have other servers for that (NAS etc) but to have pure speed, even so you can stack in some 600GIG Drives x 4 or so and your good to go.
Money
One of these does not come cheap – not by a long stretch – with the money for One fully loaded server you could buy a very good car indeed. The noise of this thing when it spins up can be heard a few streets away and no space for your top end graphics card – this is not a gaming rig.
