Dell's PowerEdge 6650 packs power and punch in a small package. This well-designed little server is 4U tall and has a ton of features, such as a front-loading processor drawer, that make it optimal for rackmounting. The most efficiently constructed of the three servers we tested, the PowerEdge 6650 is competitively priced, includes good management software and has excellent stability.
Dell has revamped its design. Beyond its new industrial look, the PowerEdge has features that make the insides highly accessible from the front and top of the unit. True, we had a hard time keeping a straight face while imagining Dell's young spokesman, Steven, saying, "Dude, you're getting Active Bezel," and picturing him extolling the virtues of the server's minimalist gray faceplate, with a neon-blue Dell light that turns to a red exclamation point when there's a problem. But there's a lot to say about what's hidden underneath. The bezel snaps off easily, revealing access to the floppy drive, CD-ROM or optional DVD-ROM drive and power switch. A one-line LCD displays text-based error messages and numeric error codes. The CD-ROM/floppy drive can be removed easily with the system shut down by removing the Active Bezel and opening a small latch on the left side of the drive assembly. Inside, there is also space for as many as five 72-GB drives--a 360-GB capacity.
Dell put serious thought into the server's internal design. Even getting inside the box is easy--simply turn a thumbscrew on the machine's back and take off the two lockable top covers. To service the memory cards and floppy disk/CD-ROM drive controller, for example, you flip butterfly levers on the cards to raise them out of the connectors without removing them from the system. This technique reduces the possibility of electrostatic-discharge damage. Next, remove the six hot-plug fans in the center of the system.
Once the covers are off, you can actuate two levers on the front of the system to slide out the processor tray. This easy-to-use design has some advantages over more traditional methods of processor removal. You can end up with all the fans lying about, but this is a minor inconvenience. The processors and heat sinks are held down by a large, hinged metal cover. The heat sinks simply sit on the Xeon MP processors, which are secured into ZIF (zero-insertion force) sockets below the heat sinks.
The PowerEdge 6650's two 900-watt power supplies use large, nonstandard power cords (the HP system does too). This lets the unit take in 110-volt standard power, even fully loaded. As with so many of the other components, a lever releases each power supply. The dual independent power sources allow you to plug the server into more than one power grid, for fault tolerance. Unfortunately, Dell's clever designers faltered here: The power supplies must be removed from the top, rather than from the front or back of the unit. IBM makes its power supplies replaceable from the rear, and HP's can be taken out of the front.
The PowerEdge 6650 has eight expansion slots. One is a legacy 32-bit PCI 2.2 slot, for additional backward compatibility. Three of the remaining PCI slots have a PCI-X bus to themselves; the other four share two PCI-X buses. The onboard NICs also share a PCI-X bus. Although this machine has even more slots than the much larger IBM system, the Grand Champion HE chipset provides only six PCI-X buses to work with, so even with an extra PCI-X slot, the aggregate bandwidth you need must not exceed the available bandwidth.
Dell was the only competitor to include two on-board Gigabit Ethernet NICs, which reside on the rear multi-I/O card. This card also contains the two USB ports, serial port, and PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports. The rear card is convenient, but you can't hot-swap it. You can set the NICs for failover and load-balancing, but if both NICs fail, you cannot swap on the fly. To add hot-swappable, removable NICs, you'll need to disable the on-board ones. Dell says it put the NICs onboard to provide more usable PCI slots. For all but the most mission-critical applications, the onboard NICs will serve nicely.
The PowerEdge 6650 comes with Dell OpenManage and OpenManage Server Assistant, which aid in installing, configuring and managing the server. Server Assistant does a slick job and makes installing the server's OS a breeze. OpenManage lets you perform common management tasks and sends out notifications via e-mail. It also allows you to monitor and manage other Dell machines on your network, provided they have loaded the appropriate software instrumentation. You can get the Dell Remote Assistant Card (DRAC) for $699 with a modem or $499 without. This card allows for out-of-band management to keep track of applications, server health and remote setup.
In our tests, the PowerEdge 6650 performed very well, winning three out of four of our Intel Iometer tests. Although the unit finished last in our Caw Networks Web Avalanche test and NetIQ Chariot NIC-performance test, we were satisfied that the server's performance was well within acceptable variance for testing--especially since the differences in performance from best to worst on both tests are truly insignificant (see performance table).
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Dell's PowerEdge 6650 packs power and punch in a small package. This well-designed little server is 4U tall and has a ton of features, such as a front-loading processor drawer, that make it optimal for rackmounting. The most efficiently constructed of the three servers we tested, the PowerEdge 6650 is competitively priced, includes good management software and has excellent stability.
Dell put serious thought into the server's internal design. Even getting inside the box is easy--simply turn a thumbscrew on the machine's back and take off the two lockable top covers. To service the memory cards and floppy disk/CD-ROM drive controller, for example, you flip butterfly levers on the cards to raise them out of the connectors without removing them from the system. This technique reduces the possibility of electrostatic-discharge damage. Next, remove the six hot-plug fans in the center of the system.
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