Savtira streams media and apps from the cloud with beefy PowerEdge C combo

April 18, 2011

Savtira Corporation, who provides outsourced Cloud Commerce solutions, has chosen Dell DCS’s PowerEdge C line of servers and solutions to deliver streamed media and apps from the cloud.  Dell’s gear will help power the Savtira Cloud Commerce platform and Entertainment Distribution Network (EDN).

With a little help from PowerEdge C, businesses will now be able to use EDN to stream all digital media (business apps, games, music, movies audio/ebooks) from the cloud to any device.  One of the particularly cool features is, since the state and configuration are cloud-based, consumers can switch between devices and pick up exactly where they pushed pause on the last device.

Talk about supercharging

To power Savtira’s EDN data center, the company picked PowerEdge C410xs packed with NVidia Tesla M2070 GPUs and driven by PowerEdge C6145s.  If you think GPUs are just for rendering first-person shooters, think again.  GPUs can also cost-effectively supercharge your compute-intensive solution by offloading a lot of the processing from the main CPUs.  According to NVidia, for 1/10 the cost and with only 1/20 of the power consumption, GPUs deliver the same performance as CPUs.

To  help you get an idea of the muscle behind this solution, the PowerEdge C410x PCIe expansion chassis holds up to 16 of the Tesla M2070s GPUs, each of which exceeds over 400 cores.  Two fully populated C410xs are in turn powered by one PowerEdge C6145 for a combined total of 33 Teraflops in just 7U.

Talk about a lot of power in a little space 🙂

Extra-credit reading

  • PowerEdge C6145 — Dell DCS unveils its 4th HPC offering in 12 months, and its a beefy one
  • PowerEdge C410x — Say hello to my little friend — packing up to 16 GPGPUs
  • NVIDIA: from gaming graphics to High Performance Computing

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Now Available, HPC monster machine

March 1, 2011

A couple of weeks ago, we announced the PowerEdge C6145 system made up of two servers crammed into a 2U enclosure with a total of 96 cores.  Today that system officially became available for purchase.

Rave reviews

This system got a great review in  CRN yesterday entitled “Performance Of Dell’s PowerEdge C6145 Rack Server Off The Charts.”  To give you a taste, here is how the article begins:

Dell (NSDQ:Dell) has really outdone itself. On Tuesday, the company begins shipping a machine that the CRN Test Center can only describe as 2010 Server of the Year squared.

Officially called the PowerEdge C6145, Dell’s latest monster server more than doubled the Geekbench score of the reigning champ, the Dell R815.

This is from the article that SearchDataCenter.com did:

Talk about dense. Dell’s new PowerEdge C6145 server stuffs eight AMD Opteron processors in a single 2U enclosure, making it a standout for high-performance computing (HPC) and, potentially, virtualization…By way of comparison, Dell called out Hewlett-Packard’s eight-way ProLiant DL 980 G7, which has 8U and takes up four times as much space as the Dell box. This is especially important in HPC environments, which, in their scope, tend to put a premium on footprint.

And the Register had this to say

This will be extremely useful for companies that want to attach lots of storage or networking to server nodes in dense configurations, or those who want to cram in a lot of cores into a box and lash them to lots of external GPU co-processors.

The C6145 is Dell Data Center Solutions group’s fourth HPC system in 12 months.  Looks like we’re picking up some momentum 🙂

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

And on the other end of the spectrum — Microservers

February 16, 2011

Monday I wrote about the announcement of our mega-beefy, 96-core PowerEdge C6145 server, specifically geared to customers solving big problems involving huge and complex data sets in mapping, visualization, simulations and rendering.

At the other end of the spectrum however are customers, such as those offering low-end dedicated hosting solutions, who are looking for systems with only enough processing and storage to serve up straight-forward, focused applications such as those for serving up webpages, streaming video etc.  These “right-sized” systems are referred to as “micro” or “light weight” servers.

Take a listen to Data Center Solutions marketing director Drew Schulke below as he explains the origin of the microserver and walks you through our second generation offering in this space.

Some of the area Drew covers:

  • How did Dell get into the microserver market 2-3 years ago
  • How the progression of Moore’s law caused processing power to out strip the needs of many applications.
  • A walk through of our second generation microserver which packs 12 single socket servers into one 3Uenclosure.

We will continue to be making noise in this space.  Be sure to tune in next time as our topic will be a mini “case study” on Dell’s first generation microserver deployed at a large hoster in France.

Extra-credit reading:

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Dell DCS unveils its 4th HPC offering in 12 months, and its a beefy one

February 14, 2011

Today Dell Data Center Solutions (DCS) is announcing the PowerEdge C6145, number four in our line of offerings targeted specifically at High Performance Computing.  This AMD-based system, which contains two four-socket servers for a total of 96 cores, ranked as the highest performing x86 2U shared infrastructure server on the market based on SPECfp_rate2006 results. In addition, the PowerEdge C6145 can deliver up to a 534% better price performance at 1/5 the cost and 1/4 of the rack space when compared to HP’s ProLiant DL980 G71.

The HPC beat goes on

When we in DCS launched our PowerEdge C line almost a year ago, our first HPC-focused machine was the Intel-based C6100.   We followed it three months later with our C410x expansion chassis to supercharge it and then, three months after that, we came out with the AMD version of the C6100, the PowerEdge C6105.   Now three months after that system debuted we are unveiling the C6145.  All three servers come in the same 2U package but with differing chips and architectures targeted at different HPC application types.

Check out the video below and let the C6145 architect, John Stuewe take you on a quick tour of this new muscle machine.

Hairy problem solver

The PowerEdge C6145 with its 755FLOPS and up to 1T of memory is specifically geared to solving big problems involving huge and complex data sets in mapping, visualization, simulations and rendering, and solving them faster.  With regards to efficiency, the shared infrastructure design of the system can reduce the number of individual fans by 1/4 compared to traditional 2U systems with less power needed to cool and resulting in higher performance per watt, per dollar.

Super charge it

As if 96 cores packed into 2U wasn’t powerful enough, you can take your workloads “to 11” with the help of the PowerEdge C410x.  The C410x PCIe expansion chassis allows you to double the server to graphics processing unit (GPU) ratio to 1:8 to create a number-crunching uber powerhouse.

Dell DCS has been listening to their HPC customers and rolling out systems to meet their needs, today we’ve announced the latest in our line up, the PowerEdge C6145.

Extra-Credit reading:

Pau for now…

1 Based on testing by Dell Labs. Dell PowerEdge C6145: SPECfp_rate2006 of 1310 in 2U as compared to HP ProLiant DL980 G7: SPECfp_rate2006 of 1080 in 8U.  SPEC® and the benchmark name SPECfp® are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.  Competitive benchmarks stated above reflect results published or submitted to www.spec.org as of Feb 14, 2011.  The comparison presented above is based on the best performing 8-chip x86 servers.  For the latest SPECfp_rate2006 benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org/cpu2006. Actual performance will vary based on configuration, usage and manufacturing variability.

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Posted by Barton George

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