Dell PowerEdge M915 Blade Server Chassis

Dell's PowerEdge M915 blade server features a full-height form factor and is designed for the PowerEdge M1000e blade enclosure. The M1000e enclosure can support eight full-height blades, 16 half-height blades or a mix in any configuration. The enclosure provides shared power, cooling, networking, and centralized management for the supported blade servers.

Performance

The Dell M915 blade server features up to four AMD Opteron 6100, 6200 or 6300 series processors with up to 16 cores each for a total of up to 64 cores in a four processor configuration. Administrators can start with just two processors and add two more CPUs and memory as business needs change. AMD processors also offer a more affordable price point than comparable Intel Xeon processors.

Memory

Each processor controls four channels and eight memory slots for a total of 32 supported memory slots in a four processor configuration. Registered low voltage DDR3L DIMMs (LV RDIMM) are supported for reduced power consumption, an excellent feature that maximizes ROI. Depending on memory configuration and installed processors memory will run at up to 1600MT/s. Unbuffered DIMM (UDIMM) modules are not supported.

Storage

There is room for two hot plug SAS or SATA SSDs or two SAS HDDs on the front of the server blade. This system will also operate in a diskless configuration with no storage controller. With disks installed on the system, and either a PERC H200 or PERC H700 Modular controller installed, enables two four channel 6Gbps connections. External storage options are available with the appropriate I/O modules (IOM) on the M1000e chassis paired with the correct mezzanine cards in the M915 chassis. An internal Dual SD card module can be used to support a hypervisor in failsafe mode when used in mirror mode for redundancy.

Expansion

Two integrated network daughter cards are supported for network communications, either a version with dual 1GbE ports or one with dual 10GbE ports. The network daughter cards use the same PCIe pathways to connect to the CPU without taking up any of the four PCIe 2.0 mezzanine slots. The four mezzanine slots can be used to support additional network cards featuring dual 1GbE, 10GbE or Quad Data Rate (QDR) InfiniBand. 4 x 1 Quad port Ethernet mezzanine cards are not supported. Including two dual port 10GbE daughter cards and adding four additional dual port 10GbE mezzanine cards will provide up to 120Gbps of throughput to support highly virtualized applications. The network interface cards (NICs) or converged network adapters (CNAs) link up to a corresponding card in the M1000e enclosure I/O modules, which in turn connect to the existing Dell or third-party switching infrastructure.

Management

Dell Advanced infrastructure Manager (AIM) allows Administrators to dynamically deploy and configure additional appliances and manage virtual resources. Dell's OpenManage systems management paired with iDRAC6 with LifeCycle controller also provides tools for deployment, monitoring, and updating to help simplify IT environments of any size. Dell's integrated management tools provide on-site and remote system management by using a standard browser. iDRAC6 Enterprise is standard equipment on the M915 blade server and offer the most comprehensive set of tools for managing the system.

Summary

Dell's PowerEdge M915 server for Dell's M1000e enclosure delivers incredible throughput when configured for I/O intensive applications. With a high core count and substantial memory, this system is also an excellent choice for highly virtualized environments.