Dell PowerEdge M910 Blade Server

Description

The Dell PowerEdge R910 blade server features four sockets and is one of several blade servers compatible with Dell's PowerEdge M1000e enclosure, which can support up to eight of these full-height server blades. The M1000e enclosure provides redundant power, cooling, and the networking infrastructure for several generations of both Half-height and full-height blade servers, or a mix of both.

Performance

Intel's E7510 chipset supports a maximum of four processors, either four Xeon 7500, 6500, E7-2800, E7-4800, or E7-8800 product families, but they cannot be mixed. The Intel Xeon E7-2800 and Intel Xeon 6500 series processors are for two-socket configurations and cannot be upgraded to support a four-socket configuration. Your choice of processor will determine the amount of memory supported on the system.

Memory

With a full complement of four processors and all 32 DIMM slots loaded with 32GB DDR3 memory modules, the Dell M910 server will support up to 1TB at transfer speeds of up to 1333MT/s. However, actual performance depends on specific processor capabilities. This system supports single-rank, dual-rank, and or quad-rank registered DDR3 (RDIMM) memory modules only. DIMMs of different speeds can be mixed and will operate at the fastest shared frequency.

Storage

There are two storage bays up front that support 2.5-inch hot plug SAS and SATA SSDs or a hot plug SAS HDD drive. For increased resiliency, Administrators have a choice of two internal HD/RAID controllers, either the PERC Modular H200, or the PERC Modular H700 with 512GB cache, both of which support 6Gb/s. External storage options are supported with an appropriate external HD/RAID controller. A dual SD card module can be used with an embedded hypervisor for virtualization and can support a bootable operating system image for virtualized platforms. An optical drive is optional on this server.

Expansion

There are a total of four PCIe 2.0 x8 mezzanine connectors. The system also supports dual embedded Broadcom 5709S dual port GbE controllers on motherboard (LOM) that also support the PCIe 2.0 interface to connect to the motherboard. The four mezzanine connectors can be populated with several different card options that include dual port 1Gb, 10Gb, and Quad Data Rate (QDR) InfiniBand connections to support some serious throughput.

Management

Management of this blade server is handled by Dell OpenManage paired with iDRAC6 with Lifecycle controller. iDRAC6 Enterprise is standard on this blade server and features a comprehensive set of management tools for on-site, on cloud, and remote management. These integrated management features can also help upgrade firmware and BIOS and deploy bare metal chassis configurations.

Summary

Outfitted with four CPUs and a full complement of memory The Dell PowerEdge M910 blade server delivers exceptional performance and throughput. Eight four-socket blade servers in the M1000e chassis take up 10U of rack space, which is basically a third of the required space in comparison to using traditional 4U, 4-socket rack servers. Administrators can start out with just two processors, and as business needs change add two more for a total of four. This server is an ideal choice for extreme virtualization and demanding applications common to data center deployment.