InfoWorld recently named the Dell PowerEdge R905 the Best Virtualization Server of 2009 in the magazine’s roundup of Technology of the Year Awards. We’re thrilled with this recognition, particularly as we were also named “Best Overall Provider of Storage for Virtualized Environments” by Nemertes Research. Pretty cool!
Bruce Eric Anderson and I had a chance to talk with two of the people behind the review and the award: Jerry Sousares, PMP, development manager for Dell’s four-socket servers and Zelinda Yañez from Dell’s server product marketing team. Take a minute to watch the interview below.
But Why Virtualization, You Ask?
Virtualization is one of the hottest trends in the data center. CIOs want to increase productivity and get more value from their IT spending. And they are turning to virtualization to improve server use and reduce energy costs. Virtualization can provide near-term and meaningful ROI by reducing power, cooling, licensing expenses. All good stuff.
What’s So Special About the PowerEdge R905?
Dell was the first major OEM to offer virtualization-optimized servers in April 2008. The Dell PowerEdge R805 (a dual-socket 2U server) and the PowerEdge R905 (a four-socket 4U server), are designed specifically for virtualization with virtualization-optimized features. The R905 comes with embedded VMware or Citrix XenServer hypervisors to do away with messy deployments. It is also equipped with AMD Opteron Processors with AMD-V (AMD-Virtualization) and RVI (Rapid Virtualization Indexing) for great virtualization performance.
The servers also have unique Dell virtualization design-ins such as a exclusive pseudo-cross (kite) HT topology in a 4-socket configuration, which can reduce inter-CPU memory hops by up to 50 percent. It sports dual coherent HT links in 2-socket configuration, 32 DIMM slots giving up to 256GB DRAM and 8 x DDR2 DIMMs per processor. The R905s are power optimized for best performance/watt with highly efficient power supplies and other design elements.
All of that makes it pretty worthy competitor in the virtualization space. We’d love to hear if you’re currently running the PowerEdge R905 and what your experience is.