New chipset delivers up to 20% increase in performance
Dell recently sent us its R730xd PowerEdge rack server with uprated Intel Broadwell-series CPUs. The company claims that the 2U server with 22 cores is 20% faster than boxes running the older Haswell family of Intel chips.
In our testing, we found that Dell is right.
The server arrived and we slammed it into our crowded rack at Expedient in Indianapolis. The R730xd was really crammed, yet there was room for more. The 2U frame has room for 16 3.5-inch drives, totaling 128TB of storage. Added PCIe SSD drives can make it a hybrid storage SAN without going to SAN resources.
Like HPE servers, Dell can take forever and a weekend to boot. This said, inside is a highly articulate management console that allowed us to re-fit operating system after hypervisor. We tried VMware 6, Windows 2012 R2 (don’t tell Microsoft that the previews of Server 2016 worked, too), and Red Hat Enterprise 6. Then we tried CentOS, but we did have one kernel explosion with FreeBSD that we were unable to repeat. XenServer 6.5 worked without incident.
Dell ships the iDRAC v.8 (Intelligent Dell Remote Access Controller Express) management software at no charge. The enterprise version of iDRAC is optional. For our purposes—we don’t manage a fleet of Dells—the Express version is fine.
Ethernet choices can range from 4x1GBE to 4x10GBE; we received the 4x10GBE version; these are embedded in the motherboard. It screams.
Container ship or DB?
Because the R730xD can add up to 128TB of storage, then additional PCIe flash can be added atop that number, cached storage ideas start to come to mind immediately. It’s not quite insane internal storage, but for a local, non-SAN amount of disk, in a 2U, it’s quite large.
The NVIDIA Tesla graphics board fits inside—if you change the fan shroud to change its angle of airflow. The differences between using the NVIDIA with this server, rather than say, an HPE Gen9, is simply this: you risk cooking the NVIDIA Tesla because the air flow pattern/cooling between the two servers are decidedly different, and the fan shroud will need to be changed. So we didn’t use it inside the R730xd for want of the correct shroud.
This said, with the correct shroud, 128TB means a desktop, VDI, and/or app server under VMware Horizon View, XenApp, or Ericom connection brokerage with a sufficient amount of CPU and potential GPU support to make the R730xd a modular and very muscular VDI machine.
Testing
Over the course of a month, we used the PowerEdge with differing workloads. Not having an older version didn’t give us much in terms of ability to compare old vs new. We only had a sense that, yeah, it was faster.
As an experiment, we installed VMware 6, using this as a base hypervisor to judge execution times of a couple of benchmarks, in a gradient of vCPU allocations between the Dell R730xd, and another 2U we’ve recently reviewed, the Lenovo RD630—containing a pair of Intel Xeon E5-2600 CPUs. This became a test of the older version Xeon E5-2600s versus the E52699s. We ran tests using one and then four vCPUs using identical versions of the hypervisor, and Ubuntu 16.04 Server editions to compare.
Net results
COMPANY: DELL
PRODUCT: PowerEdge R730xd Server
PRICE: Starts at $2,469, $7,548 as tested
PROS: Very large storage capacity, uprated CPUs, dense flexibility
CONS: Mild inconveniences
COMPANY: DELL
PRODUCT: PowerEdge R730xd Server
PRICE: Starts at $2,469, $7,548 as tested
PROS: Very large storage capacity, uprated CPUs, dense flexibility
CONS: Mild inconveniences
The Dell R730xD CPU performance appears to be 17% faster than the Lenovo with LMBench(mark), with floating point ops (measured by Linpack) only 15% faster. The standard caveats apply, although we found using four vCPUs produced greater overall result, larger than one vCPU multiplied by four, and so operating system overhead (likely Linux kernel) optimized using four vCPUs. We feel that multi-CPU OS kernels are capable of “chewing” more CPU, hence the slight increase in overall threads efficiency.
From a service perspective, the Dell is crammed tightly, but we were able to take it apart without holding a PDF diagram and using 11 screwdriver bits, which is always a joy. Drives are a bit more difficult to remove, and the internal storage management software dutifully attempts to restore dead drives quickly, although the user interface in iDRAC sometimes took pause after we made physical drive changes. This is a cramped can, perhaps the most cramped 2U we’ve seen. And while cramped, we felt that restoring hot-pluggable items wouldn’t represent much of a challenge.
Upsides and downsides
Unfortunately, there aren’t enough jacks on the face of the system to run a crash cart (monitor, keyboard, and mouse) solely from the front panel. Blah. We connected it to the rear, instead. But the iDRAC software is really good, and we didn’t need to connect the crash cart but once, as virtually all operating systems can be remotely loaded. If you’re adept at PxE or iDRAC optional Enterprise software, you’ll unlikely need a crash cart at all.
The iDRAC software isn’t good at finding NFS shares as a remote program loading source, and NFS is our usual NOC ISO image source. Not to worry, lack of NFS compatibility was remedied by simply loading them over our VPN using a notebook as an image source as we sipped coffee, adding broadband transport time between the lab and NOC to our image loading time equation.
Integration with a working DNS infrastructure isn’t needed to run iDRAC and it swallowed our odd networking (many VLANs) without complaint. This said, there aren’t quite the in-frame networking options that other vendors are able to construct. Networking options are worth exploring prior to a deployment to ensure desired flexibility.
Scorecard
Administration: 4.5
Serviceability: 4.5
Performance: 4.5
Features/Docs: 4
total: 4.375
Administration: 4.5
Serviceability: 4.5
Performance: 4.5
Features/Docs: 4
total: 4.375
This is a fast, no-apology, tightly packed 2U server with enormous potential multi-tier storage capacity. We found it fast, flexible, controllable, with only very minor frustrations. Depending on its use, and we had no difficulties with any operating system payload (note single oddity, above), and it hummed in our NOC for three months without incident.
How we tested Dell R730xD server
We connected the Dell R730xD into our rack, and in turn, to an Extreme Summit Series 10G Ethernet switch, that was in turn connected to Expedient’s backbone in Carmel, Ind. Except for the initial firmware exam, we used the embedded iDRAC control plane management web software to load operating systems, using standard/non-proprietary/generic ISO images. We did not optimize the operating system through the use of optional drivers or firmware payloads for storage, and a transient number of these payloads were found in our searches.
We accessed the network through our VPN, remotely controlling it from various locations using a variety of proprietary RDP/RDC apps, as well as web access over the VPN to the management plane where the R730xD was located.
We compared this to a Lenovo RD630 server on the same switch and VLAN in order to observe comparative performance. No optimizations of benchmarking software were performed in any way—everything was at defaults.
This story, "Dell PowerEdge R730xd: Now with Intel Broadwell afterburners" was originally published by Network World.
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