Dell VRTX noise

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Bjorn Smith

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Sep 3, 2019
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Hi,
I am considering bying a Dell PowerEdge VRTX, since I have been looking at it for a while and I really like the "everything in one box" approach.

I know the tower version of the chassis is extremely low noise considering its a blade chassis: see ->
Youtube video

But I am wondering if anyone here know if the rack version have similar acoustics?

I dont want to buy the rack version just to find out that it is just as noisy as a normal blade chassis or a rack server.

Thanks in advance
 

frogtech

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Jan 4, 2016
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There's no mechanical difference between the rack and tower versions, it's simply a matter of orientation and which plastic pieces they come with.

The VRTX is not as quiet as advertised in my experience, remember it still has 6 80mm fans and 8 blower fans (4 modules that each contain 2 blowers). And one thing that's worth noting is that config in the video only has 2 blades and 5 hard drives...once you start adding expansion cards to it, as well as more blades and drives, the default PWM cycle speeds up.

You basically can't run add in cards in these things without sacrificing noise/comfort because the fans are too far forward that the low PWM cycle won't be able to cool them adequately. But barring that anyway, the default behavior of the infrastructure is to speed up the fans when the presence of AIC are detected.
 

Bjorn Smith

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Sep 3, 2019
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Ok,
Thanks - its good to know that they are not different mechanical.

I realise its not fully specced, but I still think its pretty awesome that they can make it run that silently even if there are only two blades and 5 disks in in.

I would not want to run it fully populated with disks anway - at least not in the beginning and I would probably only run SSD's in it, which hopefully should make it run a bit cooler.

I am guessing you should be able to control the fans via ipmi to slow them down and possibly run a bit hotter than the system itself would like to do.

It is just so damn hard to find any specs for these kind of blade systems on how much power they suck up and how much noise they make.

Since you apparently know these systems. Do you know how much power the chassis itself uses - I know the fans will use quite a bit of power in particular if they run full blast, but usually my servers run at almost idle 24/7 - so if I could get some power figures for 2-4 blades in this baby it would be awesome.
 

frogtech

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Jan 4, 2016
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I've only ever run it fully populated, with dual E5-2650v2 procs in 4 M620 blades, I would expect 600-700w on idle. But I haven't had one in a while so I don't remember exactly.

I would expect much better numbers with DDR4 and M630 blades since the PCH is more efficient.
 
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