The truth will out. But will it be out in time? - Mike Magee
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Dell gets all purtied up
INTEL DIDN'T HAVE much to launch at CeBIT, but the firm sure packed their booth with partners. Of those, Dell had the most to show off, including a new look to replace the black servers you know and, umm, know again.
The new look of Dell
If you have been underwhelmed by the styling changes Dell has made lately, you are in for a pleasant surprise. The new Poweredge line looks really different, and one might even say good. Might. This is the Poweredge R710, a standard 2U rackmout server. Since Dell sells these by the container ship full, expect to be staring into lots of these over the next few years.
And in pedestal form
The rack mount look is OK, but the pedestal is much nicer in Poweredge T300 form. It looks to have a lot of cooling holes and USB ports mounted in a way that doesn't make you curse the lineage of the designer. Add in a LCD readout and you have a fairly functional front plate. Expect the 4U versions to look a lot like this, just 90 degrees off.
Rounded and wood
You might have heard about the Studio Hybrid PC from the boys in Round Rock. It is little, wood, and to use the local vernacular, purty. Darn purty. Even purtier than that is the Dell Crystal 22" monitor. It is made of glass, has embedded speakers, and you can see all the wires. Geeks like this, and I am a geek, so...... That said, to use the vernacular of this site, the keyboard doth look to bloweth or something like that.
One more to mention is the Optiplex FX160 thin client. It is hard to get excited about these things, but they do exist, and are useful. They would be cheap if you didn't have to buy a CAL for each one, so unless you have a very special enterprise setup, you might want to stick with a PC, or get the best of both worlds and but a Linux based Vostro. Win/Win. µ
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I really really wish they would stop designing these rather dapper looking monitors, then ruining them by attaching speakers. If I want a pair of speakers, I'll bloody well go and buy a pair of speakers. They probably sound worse than the case-speaker in this early 90's abomination that's sitting in my garage.
Ok, here is the schema...from the left.
First Character (always a letter):
t=tower, r=rack, m=a blade
Next (Always a #):
The relative performance level of the server. (i.e. 9 is the most powerful...$$$, 3=enough for some applications...easy on the pocket book)
Next (Always a #):
Think of this loosly as the revision or generation of the server
Last (a #):
0 = Intel
5 = AMD
Hope this helps. Good things to come...
Looks all purty but with the bezel looking like it sits so far proud of the rack it's going to cause some problems with rack doors.
The Dell naming scheme always was 2XXX for 2U servers, but they kept incrementing the second digit until they ran out. What's the next model (ostensibly this handsomely-fronted example) going to be called?