What Happened with the Dell 1850 Rack Mount Server?

Over the years, Dell has done nothing short of hit the cover off the ball with their 1U server line. That has been the case until their latest issue, the 1850, which seems to be made more of plastic than heat dissipating metal. I am a veteran of several large-scale server farm build outs and only started using Dell servers exclusively around 2002. I made the switch to quite possibly the best server platform I have ever used, Dell's 1650 1U rack server.

Back in 1998, before the dotcom burst, I was working for a major publishing company in the San Francisco Bay area where we needed to build out a farm of Linux machines. The choice of hardware was a tough decision because no rack mounted PCs seemed to exist at the time. After searching far and wide, I happened to run into a small company at the Linux World Expo. They had a PC built into a 2U rack mount case. It looked obviously hand built to fit the form factor, but it worked for what we needed. Not too long after that, Dell Computer came out with their 1550 1U rack server. I didn't look at it at the time because we had already done our build out.

In 2001, the Internet soufflé collapsed and I moved back to New York. Not too surprisingly, the next company I worked for also required a farm build out so I was again in the market. Dell had just come out with their brilliant 1650 machine. It was nothing short of a quantum leap in terms of capability, serviceability and price.

Comparing the handcrafted rack mount world I had just come from to the Dell 1650 server is like comparing apples and oranges. Everything, it seams, has been thought through. Heat dissipation, always one of the hardest things to manage in a rack mount server, had been thought through thoroughly. Fans at strategic locations run at a various speeds depending on numerous temperature readings. Drives are easily accessible and changeable without opening the machine. Temperatures and fan speeds can be read and controlled by the software. There are keyboard / monitor connections both on front and back of the machine. The entire machine slides out on rails and can be opened without a screwdriver. All of these things set the Dell 1650 far apart from the world I was coming from.

Dell’s earlier server, the 1550, lacked a second power supply and the ability to slide the entire machine out on it’s rails, (rather it slid apart to open up) so clearly the 1650 was a bold step forward for Dell as well. (still a quantum leap from what I had previously been working with)

Dell’s next server in that line, the 1750, was essentially the same machine as the 1650 but with Xeon processors that ran at higher clock rates. I wasn’t too interested in paying the steep price tag, so I stuck with the 1650 and continued the build out by picking them up used on Ebay. For $700 per machine, I could backfill 4 1650s for the price of one 1750. By distributing the tasks over a few machines rather than using one, I got some redundancy as well as an overall faster performance for the same price and 3 additional U.

Then came the 1850. In my opinion, this machine falls far short of the mark. The first warning bell was the faceplate as I unwrapped it. It seemed surprisingly light as I opened it, and yes, sure enough, it was made of plastic. Well, you know, it doesn’t look nearly as cool as the metal ones from the 1650s, but I could forgive them that little blemish because a faceplate is all for show anyway. They do lock, but how tamper-proof is a plastic door?

The next surprise came when I opened the machine. Enormous stretches of plastic meant for airflow coordination greeted me and made me quickly see another thing I was fond of on the 1650. The metal in a 1650 makes a great heat dissipation system. All this plastic in the 1850 made for a heat trap in my opinion. Then when the heat is trapped, because the farm is never quite as cool as you want it to be, the plastic will melt. Granted I’m sure there are internal shutoffs before the heat would get to a point where it would melt plastic, but it just didn’t seem a worthwhile tradeoff to me. If you lost a fan on the 1650, you were pretty much OK. I doubt if the 1850 would be up to the task because they just run much hotter. After leaving several 1850s running for a day stacked up on a table, the ones in the middle got very hot to the touch around the back where the power supplies were.

Then I tried plugging additional cables between the machines and was greeted by an annoying ledge seemingly built to make my life difficult. The 1650s have a straight back with all the plugs in the clear. Of course you can directly access the two seperate power supplies on the back of the machine, but who cares? I have redundant power supplies anyway, and in my tenure I have never lost a power supply.

My initial reaction to the 1850s has been fairly unimpressed. I don’t see why it makes sense to make a server out of plastic. There are undoubtedly cost cutting reasons, but I will pay a little more for a server made out of metal. The stacks of slag I have at the farm are much better suited than the new plastic ones I have to consider. After a while, the slower speeds of the 1650 just won’t be worth the extra space, so something has to give. I’m stuck between a pile of slag and a plastic place…

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Dell 1U rackmount servers 1650 1850

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Comments (7)

Edward from

Try looking at Apple Xserve, alle aluminium baby with dual G5 powerpc processors

Anders from RTP

Yep, you bring up an excellent point. To date, Xserve machines have been just outlandishly expensive, but that could change if Dell continues down the plastic road. I think we're still a ways off from this now, but I will give them a second look. Thanks.

Anders from RTP

A friend pointed me to SuperMicro. http://www.supermicro.com/ (my friend started AngelFire back in the day, so he should know) SuperMicro has an interesting line with many more offerings in each category than Dell does. There isn't much plastic either. They also cary 64 bit chips from AMD which I had wanted to test in production but never could with the Dells. Still don't know about cable management in the SuperMicros but in the Dells you were better off not using the cable tray because it inhibited airflow off the back of the machine. I'll write a little story when I've tried the new machines.

P from Tokyo

Nothing wrong with plastic, its easier to form to complex patterns than metal. All you get with metal is more metal to heat up. you aren't actually winning anything by having more metal, except maybe a hernia.
Basic thermodynamics and or some empirical testing should prove that metal or plastic inside the box makes little difference. The actual goal is to convert steam from the power supplies into heat to warm up the computer room. The reason your old metal ones run cooler is simply that they are dealing with lower pressure steam and are thuse less able to heat the computer room.

The 8 or 10 turbines are a different matter, if it had wheels, it would probably move. As it is, I need to invest in ear defenders.

Noemie from Toronto Ontario Canada

I came across your page when looking at something regarding Servers. I ask you to take a look at our Server products. In as much as heat dispensation goes, we have yet to ever have a single client say their Server crashed from heat. The IPMI built into every Server we have would show an entry in the log if there was heat issues.

freebsdsystems.com

Anders from RTP

Simply, my problem with heat is that it eats away at the longevity of hardware. I have had CPUs fail long before they should have because they ran hot for too long. Fans and hard drives die prematurely the same way. I don't worry too much about a server with a heat spike as they usually sense it and shut down. (Which isn't ideal, but at least you don't burn the house down.) I worry about getting my money out of the server over its lifetime.

Creature from Ohio

You should have tried the old Netserver LXPro lineup (or was it LHPro?) from HP if heat bothered you. The whole thing was metal, sure, but you could fry eggs on top of that case if you had it stacked with all six SCSI drives.