NEW DEDICATED ROOT SERVER DX181: EPYC PERFORMANCE FOR DEMANDING WORKLOADS
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06. April 2020
New Dedicated Root Server DX181: EPYC Performance for demanding workloads
Dell is renowned for reliability, and now you can profit from the performance of AMD EPYC's second generation CPU, all in one package. Our product development team answered some questions about the new DX181:
Which Dell model is the DX181 based on?
The Dell PowerEdge R6515. It's equipped with an EPYC 7502P, which is built using Zen 2 architecture. That CPU has 32 cores and 64 threads.
What improvements has AMD made to this generation?
One of the impressive things about this CPU is that is the first 7nm x86 processor. They've been innovating to reduce structural latency. Lots of the architecture is now located directly on the CPU itself, rather than on the mainboard, for example, PCI lanes and I/O hubs, and there's fewer NUMA nodes. The developers have taken these innovations and really made the most of them to maximize the price-to-performance ratio.
How do you mean?
Well, in the past, to get the kind of performance from a server like this, you would need to have two sockets. That's because of limits you would hit because of core count, smaller amounts of RAM, and lower I/O. But the Dell PowerEdge R6515 is designed around the EPYC 7502P specifically, and so it can use just one socket. And even though it's got just the one socket, it's able to power through data-center-level workloads, but at a lower overall price. Compared to Dell's last PowerEdge generation, this server has twice the number of CPU cores and 20 % increase in memory transfer speeds. And here's one final bonus: since the efficiency of each core and processor has improved, you'll use fewer of them, and need to use fewer software licenses.
Altogether, that means that customers can increase the efficiency of their IT infrastructure and save a lot of money.
What use cases are ideal for the DX181?
They're great for large-scale virtualization, hyper-converged infrastructure, and network functions virtualization. So they're great for any use cases where you need multi-threaded processing - virtualization, Big Data, AI, rendering, and many others.
You mentioned memory earlier. What options do customers have for the DX181?
You can select your preferred type of storage that is best for your specific use case. You can add up to 10 drives to the base configuration. (Of these 10 drives, up to 8 can be SATA SSDs or up to 10 can be NVMe SSDs. And you can have mixed configurations of SATA and NVMe SSDs.) You also have options for RAM: The base configuration comes with 128 GB of DDR4 ECC RAM. You can increase this up to a maximum of 512 GB using 32 GB increments.
What about security?
AMD's integrated and dedicated Secure Processor supports Secure Memory Encryption (SEM), Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), and a secure platform boot (a hardware-validated boot). Plus, the DX181 also includes a 8 Port SATA, 12 Gbit/s Dell PERC H730P RAID controller.
What's special about the DX181?
Many customers use software that requires or at least recommends a certified brand name system. The Dell R6515 is such a system and enables them to receive support for such software from commercial third party vendors. In addition, the DX181 naturally lets users access Dell's EMC OpenManage systems management tools and utilities. This includes a repository manager, update packages, and embedded management with iDRAC 9. Plus, Dell's EMC OpenManage integrates with VMware and Microsoft System Center.
What about the price?
The base configuration starts at €189 a month plus a one-time setup fee of €189. You can use our Configurator to see the price for your ideal configuration.Prices excl. VAT.