Dell rolls out Itanium 2 server

Dell last week announced the four-processor, Itanium-based PowerEdge 7250, the second Itanium 2-based server Dell has introduced.

The 7250 uses Intel’s Itanium 2 processor to support transaction-intensive applications, such as databases, engineering applications and ERP.

It joins the Dell PowerEdge 3250, which has two processors.

The 7250 features 6M bytes of Level 3 cache memory, as much as 32G bytes of RAM, eight PCI-X slots and factory installation of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.1 AS. It ships by default with Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS v3.1, but can also be configured with no operating system.

The 4U high 7250 operates at up to 1.5 GHz and has up to 219G bytes of internal storage. The standard configuration ships with one 36G-byte, 10,000-RPM Ultra 320 SCSI hard drive. Models that have less cache memory and operate at lower rates are also available. The PowerEdge 7250 can also be configured with an Intel Pro 1000MT dual-port Gigabit Ethernet network adapter with load balancing and failover support.

It has a variety of high-availability features, including hot-plug hard drives, hot-pluggable redundant power and cooling, ECC memory and high-availability clustering support with Dell/EMC storage products.

The server is managed with Dell’s OpenManage product, which has Intelligent Platform management Interface (IPMI) support. IPMI defines an internal management bus for extending platform management within a server chassis. OpenManage includes IT Assistant OpenManage Server Administrator, which simplifies installation, monitoring and management.

By contrast, HP has introduced servers ranging from two Itanium 2 processors to 128 processors. IBM has three Itanium 2 servers – the two-processor xSeries 382, the four-processor x450 and the 16-processor xSeries 455.

A single-processor PowerEdge 7250 is available now, starting at $12,500. When configured with four Itanium 2 processors, the server starts at $27,820, according to Dell’s Web site.