Dell puts AMD chips in its servers

Dell is offering AMD-based servers for the first time, blaming volume production issues for the delay

Dell has integrated AMD processors into its servers for the first time, launching two new PowerEdge systems based on Opteron chips at Oracle OpenWorld this week.

Dell founder and chairman Michael Dell said that x86 based servers have the power and features to replace Risc-based systems in mission-critical corporate services and applications, including virtualised deployments. He added that an estimated 85 percent of Dell sales are to businesses, rather than to consumers.

“2006 marks a tipping point for the industry, because for the first time half of [all server] revenues are coming from x86 based servers; that’s a pretty big change,” said Dell. “Many of these are file and print or email servers, but they are moving into databases, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and data warehousing as well.”

Kevin Kettler, Dell’s chief technology officer, defended the delay in putting AMD processors into Dell servers - the company has been working with AMD on desktop and notebook system design for seven years - and pointed out that a lot of other factors come into play when putting different CPUs into new servers, such as chipset availability and CPU production volumes.

“The volume requirements are not insignificant and we don't want to let customers down by not having volume availability on day one. We wanted to make sure that we did not announce something that we could not deliver,” Kettler said.

Both companies believe the new servers are ideal platforms for virtualisation. “Virtualisation is not a passing fancy, or a ‘boutique’ technology for enterprise class customers,” said Marty Seyer, a senior vice president at AMD. “We’re delivering products which are fully integrated with virtualisation platforms, and will later extend beyond processor and memory virtualisation to full I/O virtualisation.”

The Dell PowerEdge 6950 is a four-socket server which consumes up to 20 percent less power than previous versions, and the PowerEdge SC1435 is a two-socket, rack-dense model that AMD estimated can deliver performance gains of up to 128 percent and performance-per-watt improvements of up to 138 percent.

Available now worldwide, the PowerEdge 6950 and PowerEdge SC1435 with dual-core, Next-Generation Opteron processors are priced from $6,499 and $1,299 excluding VAT respectively.

Dell has also integrated support for Oracle Enterprise Manager into its OpenManage application. This allows administrators to perform system discovery, reporting and configuration, manage server hardware health, see system event notifications and execute event driven policies through a single Oracle interface.