Blades Of Glory

It also was the only system that came built with six 208/220-volt power supplies (three online, three redundant in the configuration we tested). After calling in an electrician to install appropriate oblates in our lab to accommodate the power requirements, the M-Series installed and deployed very easily.

The system came with four dual Intel Xeon E5440 processors, each with 4 Gbytes of RAM. On Geekbench, it delivered an average score of 7,019, and on Passmark it came in, on average, at 2,761.3. Reviewers liked the even performance.

While running all four servers, the system consumed 1,112 watts of power, threw 70 decibels of noise from the front and 74 decibels at the back, and its thermals reached 80 degrees at the front and 86 degrees at the fan exhaust.

After logging onto the Chassis Management Controller, administrators can quickly navigate between server functionality by traversing tabs on the top of the Web page interface to configure the chassis. The left side of the CMC's Web page has a tree viewer to server components, including power supplies, temperature sensors and fans. CMC provides access to individual server controllers, Avocent iKVM switches and Gigabit Ethernet switches. To gain access to a server, administrators simply have to navigate to the console tab in the Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller and launch the viewer. Testers used the viewer to install Windows Server 2008 on each blade.

Dell provides an ActiveX control as well as a Java applet to access servers remotely. Dell also simplified the remote OS installation process by providing several remote boot-device options such as PXE and virtual media players so that administrators can build the servers without having to connect a local DVD or floppy drive.

One of the most prominent feature sets is the network security for the servers in the iDRAC user interface. In the Network/Security tab, administrators can integrate a server with Active Directory and even provide remote secured Web services such as SSH and Telnet.

Experienced engineers will find the documentation on most of the blades a hindrance. Once engineers are familiar with the external components of a blade server, they don't need to rely on the documentation to connect the servers. The Web interfaces provide enough information to install all the components. With four servers, the configuration price on this model runs to about $29,077, according to pricing on Dell.com.

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