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Enterprise computing power at a small-business price -- that's catch phrase, but in the case of Dell's PowerEdge R415, it could very well be true. The PowerEdge R415 is a 1U rack server that can sport one or two of AMD's Opteron 4100 series processors for a total of 12 cores, 128 GB of memory and 8 TB of RAID storage. And that's without adding any options. Throw in any of a score of optional host bus adapters and you're ready for high performance computing a price point that's less than $3,000.
The PowerEdge R415 is designed to be powerful to serve all the needs of the small office or department, including file and printer services, e-mail, DHCP and Web hosting, and the like. It also can be used for VDI and other small virtualization deployments. But available options and expansion capabilities such as PCI x16 slot and proprietary option slots give it the flexibility to be used in high performance computing environments and other speciality scenarios.
Announced in September, the R415 began shipping in October as a replacement for Dell's venerable SC1435 rack server. It's available with a variety of Opteron models, from the low and ultra-low power HE and EE four-core parts. The PowerEdge R415 is also intended to mimic the capabilities and avoid the complexities of blade systems costing much more in capex and power consumption costs.
For testing, Dell sent the CRN Test Center a mostly stock unit, with two 3.5-inch 250-GB 7200 RPM SATA drives, an optional second six-core AMD 4184 2.8-GHz processors and 4 GB of 1333-MHz memory. Its eight DIMM slots officially support 64 GB, but the company told me that systems board's logic will handle 128 GB in certain circumstances.
