When I first fired up the PowerEdge 2950, it wouldn't boot. Lacking even a POST screen, the handy LCD display on the front signaled an error with one of the CPUs. I popped the top to see whether anything had unseated during shipping. The interior of the 2950 is nicely organized, lacking in large baffles, and sporting surprisingly few fans. All of the components are easily accessible and even color-coded. Orange handles signify parts that are hot-swappable, such as the fans, and blue handles denote those that are not.

After checking the RAM, I pulled out the fan sets and then the CPU heat sinks. The heat sinks are constructed in such a way as to fit together like puzzle pieces, with the main cooling fans blowing right across the fins. Removing and reseating the fans, heat sinks, and processors took only a few minutes, although I wasn't so enamored with the cover-locking mechanism on the top of the case, which doesn't work as well as a similar setup found in Hewlett-Packard's ProLiant DL products. In any event, reseating the CPUs did the trick; the 2950 fired right up. Aside from this initial hurdle, the 2950 has performed flawlessly in the lab in the weeks since.

Longtime users of Dell servers can attest that the older models --particularly the seventh generation --were quite loud, even under little or no load. Dell eventually released firmware updates that brought the fan speed down to limit the noise. The 2950 doesn't suffer from this particular affliction, and it fit into the overall hum of the lab well. The small number of fans and the new case layout helps significantly.

PERC, DRAC, and perk

I began my testing by comparing the performance of the 2950 against a Dell PowerEdge 2800 armed with two single-core 3.6GHz EM64T CPUs and 4GB of RAM. All tests were conducted on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) 4, Update 4, because the hardware in the 2950 is not supported by older versions.