The 2950 easily bested the 2800, showing a performance increase of 20 percent in static page requests per second as measured by the ab benchmarking tool against a static page that was 18KB in size. I then ran the MySQL benchmarking suite against both servers from a third lab server and found the results were even more in favor of the 2950, which showed a gain of nearly 30 percent over the 2800 across all tests, finishing in 1,068 seconds. The CPU utilization was nearly identical in both servers.

I also ran Iometer disk I/O benchmarks to gauge the performance of the SAS drives and RAID controller. Although the tests showed that the PERC 5/i running a four-disk RAID5 array in the 2950 was faster than the similarly built Ultra320 SCSI array in the 2800, I encountered some problems when running the benchmarks that triggered bus resets in the SAS driver under RHEL 4, so the numbers aren't definitive. I've experienced no such problems under Windows with the Dell driver set, which leads me to believe the glitch was most likely a driver issue with the new PERC.

On the management side, the 2950 offers the DRAC (Dell Remote Access Card) 5. Now combining the functions of prior DRACs and the BMC (Baseboard Management Card), DRAC 5 offers IPMI 2.0 support, a Web interface that allows admins to power the system on or off remotely, and virtual media and console support. This new DRAC is much more informative and useful than its predecessor.

It isn't surprising that the next generation of server products from Dell offers more performance for similar money, but the array of updates in this generation is worth noting, from the SAS and SATA disk options to the updated PERC RAID controller, refreshed DRAC, and support for the newest Intel chips. It's a solid server that improves on a long heritage.

BOTTOM LINE: Dell PowerEdge 2950