Tight squeeze: Dell shrinks PowerEdge tower server from 117 grapefruit to 74 grapefruit

Dell revealed its latest refresh for its Dell EMC PowerEdge servers yesterday, emphasizing their small size and reduced latency for uses in places like hospitals, retail space or offices.

Designed for small and medium-sized businesses, the new range, which includes the T150, T550, T350, R250 and R350, is marketed for use either in edge environments, or in a data center. IT manager, take your pick.

Surprising nobody, the new entry-level servers use Intel Xeon processors, E-2300 processors to be exact. They are also equipped with what Dell calls "office-friendly acoustics and thermals", but the thing Dell seems proudest of is its shrinking of T350, which is 37 per cent smaller than its predecessor.

The higher-end 4.5u tower solution of the crew, the T350 [PDF] is 15.06 inches x 6.89 inches x 22.88 inches, which when run through The Reg online standards converter for cubic volume means it's the equivalent of 74 grapefruits, or roughly 6.7 footballs. Other features of the T350 are 3200 MT/s DDR4 speeds, support for 32 GB UDIMMS (slots for 4) and a max 128 GB memory.

• PCIe 6.0 spec just months away from completion, doubles max data transfer rate
• Vodafone names vendors tapped for Britain's first wide-scale OpenRAN build: NEC, Dell, and Samsung
• Equinix prepping to unleash 128-core Ampere Arm silicon in its 'Metal' not-quite-cloud

Biggest in the new line is the two-socket T550, with up to two processors and 36 cores per processor, up to 3,200 MT/s and 16 DDR4 DIMM slots.

Smallest of the towers in the line is the 4U T150, the official real entry-level tower with one Xeon processor and up to 8 cores. It supports 3200 MT/s DDR4 UDIMMS with 128 GB memory.

The remaining two servers in the debut are both racks, and include the R250 and R350, both 1U, and the former with 3.5" drive bays. They both have one Xeon with up to eight cores, 3200 MT/s DDR4 speeds and 32 GB DIMMS with up to 128 GB memory. The R250 also has 4 DDR4 DIMM slots to the R350's 16.

Other differences are the R350 has three PCIe Gen 4 slots to the R250's two, along with a different front drive bay configuration allowing for more overall storage and a wider range of internal controllers. ®