SynergyWorks launches Poweredge R300 Servers!
Today was interesting. Despite getting stuck stationary on the M20 for two hours thanks to an overturned camper van, I managed to get to my desk by 11am and get down to some serious work sourcing some new servers for our product lineup.
After lengthy discussions with the suppliers of our hardware I finally signed on the dotted line for a consignment of Poweredge R300 servers, yes thats not a typo, R300 - and even better, we’ve got them for the same price as our usual R200’s! Good news for us and customers!
So, whats so special about the R300? Well its not 100 times better than an R200 as the name would have you believe, but it does pack a few nice extras. The most appealing being the support for 24GB RAM which when compared to the R200’s 8GB is a huge jump. It clearly outlines how the R200 is very much an entry level machine build with limitations you’d expect on a modern desktop (8GB RAM, it’ll accept Core2Duo & Xeon 3000 processors and not Xeon 5000 series etc etc) where as the R300 supports 24GB RAM, Xeon 5000 series as well as the 3000 series chips the R200 supports, Redundant PSUs & hot-swap disks (chassis dependant) all in the same size 1U case. The R300 also features the same LCD display as on the Poweredge 1950 and 2950 units - which while mainly a gimmic to look cool, it does give out nice error codes if your ever unlucky enough to see one.
The servers should arrive with SynergyWorks on Friday to be sold as part of our range of dedicated servers. Our standard specification will include a Quad Core Xeon 2.66Ghz CPU at 1333FSB with 12MB of cache, enough to keep pretty much anything ticking along nicely and a 500GB disk as a replacement to the 250GB units we’ve been bundling with the R200’s until now.
As per always the Dell RAID controllers are not overly well supported by the Linux community & performance leaves a little to be desired. As a result we’ve opted out of the RAID cards and will fit our own 3ware 9650SE hardware RAID cards for customers who require that extra level of protection against data loss that Raid provides.
Pricing should be going out to resellers & partners tomorrow, and i’ll be interested to see what response is like.