* Dell’s PowerEdge 1855 blade servers
Dell last week announced a blade server system that uses dual Intel Xeon processors.
The Dell PowerEdge 1855 blade servers fit in a 7U high rack-mountable chassis that comes equipped with hot-pluggable and redundant power supplies and cooling, an integrated keyboard-video-mouse switch and four I/O bays for Fibre Channel switches or F5 load-balancing switches.
The 1855 blades are the successor to Dell’s less-dense 1655MC blades, which use Pentium III processors.
Each blade contains dual Gigabit Ethernet adapters, up to 16G bytes of memory and two hot-pluggable redundant SCSI drives. It is PCI-Express and PCI-X compatible. An optional Fibre Channel uplink is available which attaches to any vendor’s Fibre Channel switch for connection to a storage-area network.
The PowerEdge 1855 also ships with integrated management software called Dell Manage 4, from which IT can deploy, monitor and manage the blades and chassis either locally or remotely.
Unlike other vendors, Dell’s management module is built into the chassis and does not take the place of a server blade.
A PowerEdge 1855 blade costs 25% less than comparable Dell 1U high servers. The blade servers are designed for use in Web farms, application servers and high-performance compute clusters.
In the future they will support other technologies, like 10 Gigabit Ethernet and dual-core processors.
IDC estimates that blade server sales will grow from just more than $1 billion in 2004 to more than $7 billion in 2008.
The PowerEdge 1855 blade server, available now, starts at $1,700; the chassis is available now for $3,000. A fully populated enclosure is $19,990.
