Dell PowerEdge R820 Rack Server Rental

Dell PowerEdge R820 server has a 2U form factor, four processor sockets, and uses Intel Xeon E5-4600 series processors. It has 48 memory slots (768GB total RAM with 16GB DIMMs), has sixteen 2.5 inch drive bays, and has five PCI-E 3.0 x8 and two PCI-E 3.0 x16 expansion slots. It also has a total of sixteen, 24, or 32 physical cores. Total of 32, 48, or 64 logical cores with Intel hyper-threading enabled. The R820 has four processor sockets in a 2U vertical size. It uses the Intel Xeon E5-4600 series processor, which has lower clock speeds than the Xeon E5-2600 series.

There is also some non-uniform memory access (NUMA) scaling loss as you move from a two-socket to a four-socket server, i.e. a four socket server does not have twice the scalability as a two socket server with the exact same processor. The R820 does have sixteen internal drive bays and seven PCI-E expansion slots, so it has good I/O capacity and performance potential.

It also has twice the total RAM capacity compared to PowerEdge R620, PowerEdge R720, or PowerEdge R720xd

A good example of a fast, quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor is the Intel Xeon E5-2643 that runs at a base clock speed of 3.3GHz, with a Turbo Boost speed of 3.5GHz. This processor would give very good OLTP performance at cost of an eight-core Intel Xeon E5-2690 that runs at a base clock speed of 2.9GHz, with a Turbo Boost speed of 3.8GHz.

The R420 or R520 models are a little less expensive, but the hardware cost delta is very small compared. Remember, you are paying for licenses based on physical core counts, so you want to get the best package you can as far as the rest of the server goes. One nice fact is that the Intel Xeon E5 processor family is available in four-core, six-core, and eight core models, with specific four-core models having higher base clock speeds than the “top-of-the line” eight-core model processor. If you wanted to minimize your core-based licensing costs and were willing to give up some scalability and capacity, you could pick one of these faster base clock speed four-core model processors for your server and actually see very good single-threaded performance.

Workloads: Designed for heavy duty databases, virtualization, HPC and VDI hosting with modest dimensions will appeal to space constrained data centers.