14 DAY TRIAL // PC and server vendor Dell last week announced the availability of a new blade chassis and server. It seems that each time a new server kicks in, the allegedly perfect equilibrium between the major server players (HP, IBM, Dell and Sun) snaps and all hell breaks lose.
This is somewhat normal, as the server business is a great revenue magnet and seems to be the engine of the x86 business. Dell's newcomer triggered such a scandal by simply attempting at competing with HP and IBM's units in technical specifications (performance, energy efficiency and simplicity of packaging).
Dell claims in the issued press releases that it has revolutionized performance and packaging tests. The standard benchmarking procedures involve the usage of the SPECjbb2005 tool, but it has to be applied on systems belonging to the same class in order to be efficient. How would it sound to compare a dual-processor server platform to the latest model of Asus Eee PC and claim that the latter is a bad choice as server?
IBM, Dell and HP use the same Xeon chips and same hardware base configuration. However, Dell managed to score a raw performance of 25 percent over HP and IBM. But Dell did not benchmark its products against Sun's Blade 6000 chassis that comes in a somewhat similar configuration. Dell's M1000e chassis can hold up to 16 slim blades rigged with two processors each in a 10U chassis, while the Blade 6000 can only hold 10 blades in a 10U unit.
Sun executive Marc Hamilton was pretty annoyed at Dell's "omission" and wrote it down in a blog post. "Dell's new blade does have half the memory, half the CPUs, half the disks that the SunBlade 6000 can pack in the same 10 RU of space, but that is not all it's missing, it also comes up short with no RAID5/6, no SAS backplane and no storage blade," Hamilton noted. "Of course just for fun, I went ahead and configured one of Dell's new blades on their web site, and received an estimated ship date of March 10. Can't wait until March 10th to get your blade, don't despair, you can get a SunBlade 6000 shipped to you in a few days."
Hamilton also seems to omit something: you cannot compare four-socket blades against two-socket ones. Moreover, Sun's four-socket blades have yet to show up, so let's consider Sun and Dell even on that.