/

Reviews /

Almost a 10

Dell PowerEdge 6350 combines great performance and design.

By John Bass
Network World, 08/16/99

Dell's PowerEdge 6350 earned 9.7 points out of a possible 10 on our ScoreCard, making it the best enterprise-class server we have tested to date. And it comes at a reasonable combined cost of $38,248 - $30,234 for the PowerEdge 6350 and $8,014 for the PowerVault 200S outboard storage system.

The rack-mountable PowerEdge 6350 outscored all servers that we have tested in the file, CPU and network tests, with 10s in the first two categories and 9 in the last.

Dell�s PowerEdge 6350 is our best-performing server to date, shining in every area and excelling at file serving.

While its CPU and network test results were barely higher than its closest competitors', the PowerEdge 6350 greatly outperformed the other servers in its class on our file tests. We attribute that to Dell's Ultra2 SCSI PowerEdge RAID Controller (PERC2), a 64-bit PCI card with 128M bytes of cache, which offers amazing performance.

The server was loaded with four 500-MHz Pentium III Xeon processors, 1G byte of memory, a four-channel PERC2, nine 9.1G-byte Ultra2 SCSI drives and four Intel Pro 100+ Fast Ethernet network interface cards (NIC). Its seven PCI slots were the most PCI slots of any server we've tested.

The outboard storage system, the PowerVault 200S, houses eight 1.6-inch drive slots. The number of SCSI cables connected to the PowerVault 200S's active backplane defines whether the server is configured for one or two SCSI channels. There are no switches to configure. The PowerVault 200S comes with two load-balancing redundant power supplies and three 2+1 redundant cooling units.

The PowerEdge 6350 is extremely easy to service. It has a top entry case with three load-balancing, hot-swappable power supply units with 2+1 redundancy. Even with three power supplies, however, there is only one large power cable, keeping things tidy. All fans are loaded into a fan card that can be replaced from the top.

The front bezel has a lockable door, giving access to the disk drive, CD-ROM, power switches and three 1-inch Single Connection Attach (SCA) drive slots. A lock on the front, which is hidden by the Dell badge, secures the front bezel and top of the server.

The server was configured with two partitions. The operating system partition was on a 9.1G-byte disk in the PowerEdge 6350, while the data partition spanned the eight drives in the PowerVault 200S. The data array was configured as RAID 0 stripe set using the PERC2 array controller. The NICs were configured for full-duplex Fast Ethernet operation.

Manageability is another strong suit for this server. Not only does Dell cover integration with the major enterprise products via Dell OpenConnect, it also provides an optional remote management card and easy-to-use proprietary management software called Dell OpenManage IT Assistant.

The only thing that kept the Dell device from getting a 10 for manageability was lack of support for a full hot-pluggable PCI feature set. Though hardware support is in place, Dell doesn't yet supply hot-swappable PCI drivers for all its supported I/O cards.

Scorecard

Category	Dell PowerEdge 6350
Overall	9.7
Performance (40%)	9.7
Features and flexibility (30%)	10
Manageability (20%)	9
Serviceability (10%)	10

Feature and cnfiguration table

Server	PowerEdge 6350
Vendor	Dell (800) 999-3355 Web site
Price	Total: $38,248 -- PowerEdge6350 $30,234 -- PowerVault200S $8,014
Processor type	500MHz Pentium III Xeon with 2M-byte level 2 cache
Number of processors	4
Number of processors supported	4
Memory configuration	1G byte 100MHz ECC SDRAM
Number and type of RAM slots	16
Expansion slots present	(4) 64-bit PCI (3) 32-bit PCI
Expansion slots available	(2) PCI
Disk controller	PERC2 RAID array controller with 128M bytes of battery-backed onboard cache (2) Adaptec 7890 Ultra2 SCSI controllers on the motherboard (1) Adaptec 7860 UltraNarrow SCSI controller on the motherboard
Hard drive description	(9) 9.1G-byte Seagate Ultra2 SCSI 10K rpm
Number and description of hard drive bays	(3) 1-inch hot plug SCA slots on PE6350 (8) 1.6-inch hot plug SCA slots on PV200S
Network interface	(4) Intel Pro 100+ Fast Ethernet NICs
CD-ROM	NEC 14/32X UltraNarrow SCSI
Availability features	ECC memory Redundant cooling Hot-pluggable drives Hot-plug PCI ready Load balancing, 2+1 redundant, hot-swappable power supplies
Manageability features	Dell OpenManage IT Assistant HP OpenView NNM/SE Dell OpenManage Connections HP ManageX/SE
Security features	Front bezel lock Lockable case
Bundled software	Dell Server Assistant CD Dell OpenManage IT Assistant HP OpenView NNM/SE Dell OpenManage Connections HP ManageX/SE
Warranty	1 year on-site next business day 3 year parts

Test results:

RELATED LINKS

Server testing is performed at North Carolina State University's Centennial Networking Labs (CNL) in Raleigh, N.C. CNL tests network equipment and network-attached devices for interoperability and performance.

Bass is a senior technical staff member at CNL who designs and leads the execution of the test suites. He can be reached at john_bass @ncsu.edu.

Scorecard, NetResults and test numbers
Key findings, vendor contact info and test results.

How we did it
A look at our test methodology.

Other recent server reviews:
Micron NetFrame 5200
Dell PowerEdge 4300