With power and cooling costs accounting for increasingly large portions of IT budgets, IT departments looking to minimize total cost of ownership (TCO) are making power efficiency a priority when choosing server hardware. This white paper will examine the power efficiency of Dell Edge servers in the multi-node, 2U form factor, a form factor that is one of the most popular in many Edge and Telecom use cases because of the balance it strikes between density and expandability. This white paper will present and analyze power efficiency results for several Dell current-generation PowerEdge XR servers and also illustrate how those results compare on various parameters with a prior-generation Dell Edge server.
The environmental conditions for telecom edge computing are typically vastly different than those at centralized data centers. Telecom edge computing sites might, at best, consist of little more than a telecommunications closet with minimal or no HVAC. Thus, ruggedized, front-access servers are ideal for such deployments. The Dell PowerEdge servers check all of the boxes. Dell Technologies commissioned Tolly to evaluate the power efficiency of Dell’s XR8000, XR4000, XR5610, and XR11 servers using the industry standard Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) SPECPower benchmark and compare those to each other. The SPECPower benchmark measures server-side Java (SSJ) throughput and system power consumption. The benchmark calculates SSJ operations per watt of system power consumed. All analysis was based on public data submitted to the SPEC and published on their website.
