Dell PowerEdge 6600
When the box arrived from the courier, it had the usual warnings that it was heavy. That was an understatement. This carton, while relatively small in size when compared with some of the bulkier equipment that the Test Lab evaluates, was amazingly hard to shift. Once opened, the reason for this weight became apparent, the Dell chassis was 7RU.
After we had managed to wrangle the server out of the box, we could inspect it closer. It comes with a full array of twelve removable hard disk drive cages along the bottom of the machine and a quad-CPU module at the top.
There were four 1.6GHz Xeon CPUs in the test machine that we were supplied, however Dell is now offering 2.0GHz at the same price.
Along with the dozen HDD bays at the front of the machine there is also a CD-ROM drive and floppy drive unit, and an illuminated power button and liquid crystal display.
The rear has a housing for the redundant power supply which has three power modules. When the lockable top cover at the rear is lifted there is a whole bank of ten PCI-X hot plug slots available as well as one normal PCI slot. Under the lid are also six large removable fans assisting with the airflow. Getting to this stage you may have realised that Dell means business with this server.
This was the only server supplied in this review that came pre-installed with Microsoft Windows 2000 Server.
Overall this is a very utilitarian server which is designed and constructed for one purpose only, to serve data. With an amazing drive array combined with the four Intel Xeon processors and hotplug PCI-X expansion available until the cows come home, this would definitely have to be one of the most scalable and integrated power serving solutions we have seen in this lab to date. Ten out of ten for Dell putting all these eggs in this box. For those potential customers who need such a standalone server then the Dell PowerEdge 6600 should certainly be on your shortlist.
| Product | Dell PowerEdge 6650 |
| Price | $24,900 |
| Vendor | Dell |
| Phone | 1300 303 263 |
| Web | www.dell.com.au |
| Interoperability |  |
| Runs a wide variety of operating systems. | |
| Futureproofing |  ½ |
| Plenty of expansion potential, plus three redundant power supplies. Provided you can handle the sheer size, this machine has it all. | |
| ROI |  ½ |
| Was tested with 1.6GHz processors, now available at the same price with 2.0GHz processors. Moderately priced system considering the performance. | |
| Service |  |
| 3-year parts and labour warranty. | |
| Rating |  |
Hallmark, Xenon? Why include these two almost unknown brands, yet exclude IBM who is one of the largest x86 server manufacturers?