The PowerEdge 2850 is Dell's newest 2U workhorse server. With its high-performance disk I/O setup and excellent manageability, the 2850 is our clear Editors' Choice.

This dual-processor, six-drive–capable system launches with its 1U brother, the PowerEdge 1850; both servers have OS image parity, helping reduce IT headaches by sharing basic OS builds. The only 64-bit OS Dell currently supports is Red Hat's version of Linux.

The 2850 is designed for high-availability, 24/7 situations and has hot-pluggable drives, cooling fans, power supplies, and memory banks. The 2850's motherboard has the new Lindenhurst memory mirroring, allowing you to keep an extra set of memory modules preinstalled in spare memory banks, ready to cut over automatically if the primary set fails.

Unique among the new Xeon servers we looked at, the 2850 has an LCD panel on the front to display messages from the system or the OpenManage software suite. Using this panel, the network administrator, the management software, the server itself, or a combination of these can let a local tech know which server in the rack has a problem and what the problem is. This is a great improvement over the simple alert light on most other servers and can be a bit more useful than the informative but cryptic light-path LEDs on the IBM eServer xSeries 346.

The dual 3.6-GHz Xeons and 15,000-rpm drives helped the 2850 open up a new range of performance on our WebBench tests by far surpassing the 1U single-processor servers we tested last year ("Full Service," October 28, 2003). Not only are the requests per second and throughput numbers much higher, the points where the performance numbers start to peak are much farther along in our test cycle: Last year's servers started to plateau at 16 virtual clients on our static and dynamic CGI tests, while the 2850 peaked at 24 clients. The only other machine to do this well on WebBench was the Aberdeen Stirling 208S.

On our NetBench tests, the 2850 bested the competition, justifying the expense of the 15,000-rpm SCSI drives and powerful dual-channel RAID controller. Of the servers in our roundup, the 2850 is your best choice for a high-availability file/print server. It's built to handle disk-intensive tasks.

Unlike remote-control software, the Dell Remote Access Card 4 (DRAC4), which was installed on our test system, lets you access the server remotely, even if the OS has irretrievably crashed. You can boot and reinitialize the server remotely with a virtual boot disc via a desktop DVD-ROM drive, USB key drive, or even another server. The DRAC4 prevents unauthorized users from doing the same by using Microsoft Active Directory security and SSL encryption. Both the DRAC4 card and the standard baseboard management controller can use industry-standard IPMI 1.5 protocols to perform monitoring and basic management functions in heterogeneous server environments.

The 2850 we tested came with a PCI/PCI-X card riser chassis, which locks securely. Later this year, you will be able to configure new 2850 servers with a PCI Express riser when Intel re-spins the Lindenhurst chipset. Upgrade kits will also be available, likely including a new motherboard. But since not every server in a farm will actually need PCI Express add-on cards, starting a rollout now shouldn't be much of a problem for most companies. We're still comfortable awarding an Editors' Choice to the 2850.