Dell Aims Four-Socket Server at Modern Database Hardware Needs

Aiming to carve out a greater percentage of the high-end server market, such as in-memory database hardware requirements, Dell today unveiled a four-socket x86 server based on the Intel Xeon E7-8800/4800 v3 series processor.

Brian Payne, executive director for Dell Server Solutions, says that while two-socket servers will continue to be the most widely deployed class of rack server, new types of applications running on top of in-memory databases are increasing demand for four-socket servers that can fit in a 4U rack space.

“This is a 4U four-socket enterprise-class server,” says Payne. “It’s designed to process eight times the transactions per minute.”

Dell is trying to further eliminate what was once a bastion for RISC servers in the high end of the market using lower-cost Intel processors to force the issue. Of course, Dell isn’t the only server vendor with similar ambitions at a time when the market share held by traditional RISC servers continues to steadily decline.

Configurable with up to 6TB of memory in 96 DIMMs, 24 internal hard drives, and up to eight PowerEdge Express Flash NVMe PCIe SSDs, the PowerEdge R930 also makes use of 3.2TB PCIe solid-state drive that Dell claims it is the first to ship in a server. The company says those hot-pluggable 2.5-inch SSDs provide up to 10 times more input/output operations per second (IOPS) over traditional SSDs.

All told, Dell claims the PowerEdge R930 delivers 22 percent better performance than its previous generation of four-socket server. Dell says customers can also deploy a mix of hard drives and SAS SSDs with SanDisk DAS Cache software to reduce the price by 23 percent compared to an all-SSD configuration, while still improving performance by a factor of nine in a server that is configured with hard drives only.

Using Dell management software, the company also claims, can reduce configuration time by up to 99 percent and reduce time on manual inventory tasks by up to 91 percent.

Sharpening focus on database hardware needs further, Dell is also making an Acceleration Appliance for Databases (DAAD) offering available that is built around the PowerEdge R930 and updating the Dell Integrated Systems for Oracle Database with the new PowerEdge.

Finally, Dell is updating its PowerEdge VRTX and PowerEdge M1000e converged platforms and introducing the PowerEdge FC830 and PowerEdge M830 blade server. The PowerEdge FC830 is a full-width, half-height four-socket server block for the PowerEdge FX architecture that helps organizations quickly configure complete workloads using modular building blocks.

The PowerEdge M830 blade server is a full-height, four-socket blade server.

Corrected: A previous version of this article incorrectly said the new server's size was 1U. It's actually 4U, and the piece has been corrected. DCK regrets the error.