Installation guide
Reliability, Availability and Serviceability Features
The Dell PowerEdge 6850 server is designed from top to boom for High Availability. There are a number of features of the Power-
Edge 6850 server that enhance Reliability, Availability and Serviceability.
• Available with Dell Remote Access card 4 for remote management
• Redundant power supplies
• Dual on-board Broadcom NICs (available for network teaming)
• Embedded RAID support (ROMB)
• Up to 5 Ultra 320 SCSI internal hard drives for RAID reliability
o 18-300 GB disks
o 10K or 15K rotaonal speeds
• Support for High Availability Storage
o PCI-Express Fibre Host Bus Adapters for Dell/EMC SAN connecvity
o Connecvity with Dell PowerVault tape libraries
o Tape backup soware from Veritas, CommVault and TapeWare
Intel EM64T Implementaon on the Dell PowerEdge 6850
Dell PowerEdge 6850 servers are designed to fully exploit the latest Intel EM64T technology. The Intel Xeon EM64T processor and
Intel 7520 chipset contain a variety of new features and improvements over exisng Xeon features. One of the key improvements is
a large addressable memory space, up to 1 TB in the current release. The processor ulizes an increased number of registers, with
increased width for each register. Level 2 cache size has been increased to 1 MB, four mes as big as previous Xeon chips used on the
PowerEdge 6650. Increased cache size is a big advantage, because it brings data closer to the CPU for faster access, and increased
memory caching leads to reduced I/O. The EM64T processor also features hyperthreading performance improvements, which can
increase parallelism for processing. The Intel 7520 chipset contained on the PowerEdge 6850 supports up to an 800 MHz Front Side
Bus, while previous chipsets supported only up to 533 MHz.
One of the key performance advantages of the Intel EM64T architecture on the PowerEdge 6850 server is the use of DDR-2 memory.
DDR-2 memory is congured with higher density than DDR memory, enabling greater memory scalability. CCR-2 memory runs at 400
MHz, twice as fast as DDR memory. DDR-2 also consumes less power – it runs at 1.8V versus DDR which runs at 2.5V.
The Dell PowerEdge 6850 server features four PCI-Express slots. PCI-Express helps move data faster between processors and
memory, helping to speed up processing tasks - especially for memory-intensive applicaons like databases. PCI Express is capable of
delivering three to four mes the throughput of PCI-X, up to 64Gb/s of throughput. PCI Express technology is navely hot-pluggable,
and doesn’t require driver installaon for PCI-Express device recognion. One of the main benets of PCI-Express is that it enables
faster device driver performance.