* Dell PowerEdge certified for NetWare 6.5
The good news is that Dell recently shipped some new PowerEdge servers. The great news is that one is actually certified for NetWare 6.5! And it isn’t the low-powered one.
The Dell PowerEdge 1950, 2900 and 2950 servers and Dell PowerEdge 1955 blade server are all high-powered machines running on Intel’s latest chipset (dual-core Xeon 5100 series processors). Among the announced new or improved features for the line are:
* Fully buffered dual in-line memory modules that provide a new memory interface for faster data transmission, plus improved signal integrity and error detection.
* SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) hard drives for faster, more reliable data transmission and reduced thermal output.
* TCP/IP Offload Engine, which helps reduce traffic on a host processor to enhance system performance.
* Enhanced virtualization technology for improved performance, management and utilization in virtualized workloads such as VMware ESX, Microsoft Virtual Server or Xen.
* PCI-Express I/O, which delivers high-performance Ethernet, RAID, InfiniBand and Fibre Channel interconnect while providing investment protection for future technologies.
Of course, the really significant part is that the 2900 is NetWare certified, and can be ordered with NetWare installed! All of the servers can be ordered with SuSE Linux installed.
The 2900 form-factor is larger than the other new servers, with more room in the box so heat is less of an issue. This means that Dell can push the main memory up to a maximum of 48GB by providing 12 memory slots rather than the eight in the other 29xx boxes. The PowerEdge 2900 has room for 10 disks – up to a total of 3TB of internal disk storage. It also has six PCI-X slots and four PCI Express slots, which should accommodate a slew of different peripherals. A base PowerEdge 2900 with a single 3 GHz CPU, 1GB of memory, a 73GB disk, and no operating system costs about $4,100. Your configuration will, of course, differ.
Full specs are available from Dell and you really need to take a look. The more of these boxes that are sold, the more that will be certified for NetWare. And we’ll just hope that HP is paying attention to those numbers.
