Friday, September 21, 2012

Dell Debuts New PowerEdge C8000 Series Servers

According to recent reports, Dell has unveiled some new servers based on designs that the company will soon be putting into effect in an upcoming 10-petaflop supercomputer known as Stampede. The servers being implemented, which are PowerEdge C8000 servers, use Intel x86 CPUs and offer the flexibility to include graphics processors or even more storage, allowing you to improve performance on database, high-performance computing or cloud computing.

Users will have the ability to experiment with graphics processors, storage, memory and other elements inside servers depending on their computing needs. A lot of inspiration for these servers came from the Stampede supercomputer itself, which is still in development.

The servers will be using Intel's Xeon eight-core E5-2600 processors and coprocessors, nicknamed Knights Corner, which are expected to increase the speed of scientific and mathematical calculations. The Stampede supercomputer is a compilation of thousands of C8000-series servers that has a total of 272TB of memory along with 14 petabytes of storage.

The chassis for the PowerEdge C8000 can have up to eight blade servers with each server having between two CPUs with 16 processing cores, two internal hard drives or other storage and networking options. The servers themselves are targeted towards hosting services, Web serving and other cloud applications, according to Dell's Product Manager Armando Acosta. There are two other versions of the server, the C8220X and the C8220. The C8220X is more advanced and allows for more RAM and storage, as well as an option to add graphics processors.

In addition to that, the servers can be hooked up to the new C8000XD storage box for expandable hard drive or SSD storage. The servers are also designed for deployment in highly parallel computing environments with their ability to fit graphics processors providing the capability to offer higher performance-per-watt and the internal hard drives offering more storage capacity. What's more is that the expandable storage box provides more long-term storage and caching for databases.

According to Dell, the new PowerEdge C8220 will have a starting price of $35,000 with eight blade servers in the chassis. The C8220X will start at $42,000 and the C8000XD somewhere between $25,000 and $27,000.

Source: Equities.com - Dell showcases new servers from supercomputer