Dell's Powerhouse R910 Review

We've been using the R910 now for about 10 months. During those 10 months, I've learned this is one of those workhorse servers that can take anything thrown at it and come back for more. We have 3 of them running as HyperV host machines, and 2 running Oracle 10g and 11g Enterprise loaded with quad 8-core Intel Xeon CPUs, 128gb RAM, Perc H700 Raid Controller, with 4 146gb 15k SaS drives in RAID10 for the O/S and 12 SSD's from various manufacturers (OWC and the Crucial M4) in another RAID10 array with dual Broadcom 10gbE nics. These machines would fly outta the cabinet if they weren't secured with the sliding versa-rails. The raw speed of any operation is just crazy. IDrac6 makes remote management a breeze compared to the previous Dracs. The ease of service on these is nice, but I don't think we'll be needing that anytime soon. My ideal box would be like these, but with multiple 600gb 15k SaS drives for lower volatility data sets. I would add-in some Fusion-io or Virident cards for my data sets requiring extreme I/O, low latency, and high throughput. Imaging a DML statement running in parallel across 32 cores reading & writing to several FIO or Virident cards simultaneously. This server platform has plenty of PCI-E slots to fill up with those types of cards. Yes, in my mind, the R910 is the beast under your bed, in your closet, or in your head....

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Location:Columbus, Ga