The server market has seen some big changes recently. but Dell EMC looks set to shake it up even further with the largest product launch in its history. The 15th-generation PowerEdge family comprises 17 new and refreshed models and in this hands-on review, we look at the latest version of its trusty 2U data centre workhorse.
As expected, the PowerEdge R750 supports Intel’s 3rd Generation ‘Ice Lake’ Xeon Scalable CPUs which finally give AMD’s
well-established EPYC chips some serious competition. Employing a 10nm architecture, they range from 8 to 40 cores and up to 64 PCI-E 4 lanes per socket, support DDR4 memory speeds up to 3,200MHz and claim an average 46% performance improvement over the previous generation for common data centre workloads.
Three versions of the R750 are available, but we’re focusing on the standard general-purpose model. The R750xa is built for GPU-based workloads and claims the highest density of GPUs in a 2U rack server while the R750xs is a cost-optimized version aimed at specific customer workloads.
The R750 presents a radical redesign over the R740 with a sharper focus on internal cooling. Storage capacities stay the same, with a maximum of 28 SFF bays available, but NVMe SSDs get some serious attention and expansion potential receives a massive boost.