PowerEdge C6220 II "Killer of 1U form factor" 2U Rack Server with four "sleds"

• Introduction
• Typical use
• Remote management
• Dynamic allocation of HD between nodes
• Electrical efficiency
• Technical specifications

Introduction

Dell’s C6220 II server squeezes four Xeon E5-2600 v2 systems into 2U of rack space, essentially doubling density.  It is sometimes called "Killer of 1U form factor" server ;-)

C6220 was released in April 26, 2012 and in 2013 updated for Xeon E5-2600 v2 line of Intel CPUs.  It is a custom machines for very large customers who want fewer bells and whistles but higher computing density and lower power consumption. The PowerEdge C6220 is being marketed as a high-density server solution primarily targeting HPC (high-performance computing) and virtual server clusters.

It has weak onboard RAID controller (mainly for Windows, for Linux you need at least $200 additional card and only 1Gbit NIC cards on the motherboard. So it you want 10Gbit you need to put an additional card.

The C6220 offers four completely independent, hot-swappable server nodes. Each server node can be configured independently of the other nodes in the same chassis to perform specific tasks. They can have different CPUs, different amount of memory and different number of hard drive, providing better flexibility in respect to harddrives that 1U servers. The chassis also accepts a pair of dual-height nodes which have two PCI-e expansion slots.

The four nodes are accessed at the rear where each one provides dual Gigabit ports (not 10GBit), IPMI, two USB2 port, VGA and a serial port.

• Overview
• Tech Specs

Highlights:

• Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600v2 product family, each with up to twelve cores and four memory channels, offering up to 40% greater performance over previous generation processors
• Dual Turbo Boost Technology 2.0, Advanced Vector Extensions and Ivy Bridge micro-architecture
• Intel® Integrated I/O, which can reduce I/O latency by up to 30%
• Intel® Power Tuning Technology that uses onboard sensors to help give greater control over power and thermal levels across the system

Each node supports:

• Up to 16 DIMMs of DDR3 1866MT/s memory
• One x8 PCIe 3.0 mezzanine card and up to two x16 PCIe 3.0 cards.

  Expand your I/O bandwidth and enhance the capabilities of any PowerEdge C6220 II configuration with PCIe 3.0-capable slots.

Typical use

C6220 II can be used in various high-workload-intensive environments.

• HPC — Research institutions, oil and gas, life sciences, healthcare and other large institutions that require high-performance, low-latency, massively parallel computing for dense and GPU compute clusters.
• Big data — Retail, financial services, telcos, government and other organizations performing large-scale analysis, including detailed special purpose computations, across large collections of structured and unstructured data
• Cloud — Internet service and cloud providers that need to increase revenue and performance per square foot while reducing capital and operational expenditures for large-scale hosting
• Web 2.0 — High-density hyperscale hosting that requires enhanced scalability and rapid configuration flexibility to match infrastructure to workloads

Remote management

Remote management is done differently then in standard Dell servers -- not via DRAC but via so called Baseboard Management Controller (BMC), which is  a microcontroller located on the server’s system board. BMC provides the “intelligence” within the IPMI architecture, responsible for monitoring and controlling the server’s manageable devices. Capabilities are very similar to DRAC but organized in diferent menus. It also has Java console.  Among features:

• Out-of-band monitoring and control for server management over LAN

• Dedicated NIC for remote management via network

• FRU information report, which includes system board part number, product name, and manufacturer.

• Health status/hardware monitoring report

• View and clear events log

• Event notification by lighting chassis LED indicator and Platform Event Trap (PET)

• Platform Event Filtering (PEF) to take selected action for selected events

• Chassis management, which includes power control, status report, front

• panel buttons, and LEDs control

• sled management.

Dynamic allocation of HD between nodes

Drives are installed in enclusure not in sled. Up to 12 x 3.5" or 24 x 2.5" hot-swappable SAS, SATA or SSD drives are supported. Thar means 48TB SATA and 48TB SAS maximum storage per chassis.

You can allocate different number of harddrives to each node if you use 2.5" expander backplane:

• Allocate HDDs dynamically among nodes to create multiple server configurations in the same chassis.
• The 2.5” expander backplane option enables custom allocation of hard drives among the C6220 II nodes, providing greater in-chassis flexibility.
• Set up 4-node configurations (1U sleds) for your front end, application and memcache servers or 2-node configurations (2U sleds) with maximum disk capacity for your database servers.

Electrical efficiency

• Dual 94% Platinum certified 1200W/1400W power supplies.
• Merged power distribution boards with fewer connecting cables help minimize power loss between the power supplies and the motherboards.
• Highly efficient fans and fan-control algorithm are tuned exactly to the impedance and characteristics of the chassis itself.

Get up to 40% greater performance and improved energy efficiency in the same award-winning PowerEdge™ C6220 shared infrastructure chassis with the latest Intel® Xeon® E5-2600v2 processors.

Technical specifications

NEWS CONTENTS

• 201014 : [Poweredgec-tools] Ipmi command on C6220 ( [Poweredgec-tools] Ipmi command on C6220, )
• 201014 : Dell c6220 IPMI controller odditites ( Dell c6220 IPMI controller odditites, )
• 201014 : SuperMike-II - Dell PowerEdge C6220, Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.600GHz, Infiniband QDR TOP500 Supercomputer Sites ( SuperMike-II - Dell PowerEdge C6220, Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.600GHz, Infiniband QDR TOP500 Supercomputer Sites, )

Old News ;-)

[Poweredgec-tools] Ipmi command on C6220

Adam Hough Adam.Hough at pgs.com
Fri Sep 6 07:50:14 CDT 2013

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I am in the process of upgrading the firmware on some of our C6220 systems using the ipmiflash utility.
I have several systems that have hung during the "Validating Image" in that it will never exit that stage of the flash.  I can kill the update script but leaves the ipmi interface in "update mode".  The only way I know how to get it out of this sate it to reseat the sled in the chassis to reboot the ipmi controller as in this state the ipmi controller ignores any reset commands (which is the correct action to prevent bad stuff during the actually flash).

Is there a raw ipmi command I can send to get it out of the "update mode"?

Adam Hough
Senior Computer Systems Engineer, NSA
Global Compute Resources

Two things about this -

1) for convenience I use ipmiflash on all my test systems. but at scale I use socflash only, because it does raw reads/writes to the flash rom. It never fails. However, socflash defaults the MAC address of the BMC, which you have to put back. So the procedure is to capture those macs, socflash the bmc, put them back. "bmc" tool has a convenience function you can use to facilitate this; you have to run this locally on the box. From memory:

bmc get_both_macs | tee /tmp/mymacs

# Be sure to confirm that every /tmp/mymacs file looks right / has macs in it. I've recently seen occasionally that this would fail. (Fix forthcoming)

# Apply a new image; skip image backup step; use the "all*.bin" file when you flash with socflash

socflash_x64 -s allXXXXX.bin

bmc set_both_macs /tmp/mymacs

Note - this wipes all bmc settings including which NIC it uses; so you go back to shared/DHCP.

2) Because of how it works, socflash can also be used to hard reset and/or revive a hung (or even completely dead) BMC. This resets the BMC as a side effect of reading the image and throwing it away. There are very, very few situations where this will not work:

# Hard reset a BMC

socflash of=/dev/null
The user friendly version of that is to get "peclogs" from http://poweredgec.dell.com and run the command line option to reset the bmc (I forget what it's named).

Be careful with socflash. It's powerful, but it has quirks and basically no safeties.

Michael Stumpf
System Management & Tools
Dell | PowerEdge C

Josh_Moore at Dell.com Josh_Moore at Dell.com
Fri Sep 6 08:38:29 CDT 2013

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---

Dell - Internal Use - Confidential
Good morning Adam
To add to Michael's information
The reset syntax that I have for socflash is
socflash option=r of=/dev/null
As Michael pointed out, this functionality is built into the pec-logs utility as well, the syntax is
pec-logs.sh --bmc-reset


Josh Moore

Dell c6220 IPMI controller odditites

Dell c6220 IPMI controller odditites"

The networking configuration of the IPMI controllers on our new Dell c6220 boxes is strange to say the least. We've encountered issues where the IPMI controller binds to a random interface, usually making itself inaccessible to the world.

I've done some digging into this, and it seems that the IPMI controller is really an embedded Linux device (no surprise there). It has two main network interfaces:

• bond0 – This is used for the "shared" network option of the IPMI controller. As far as I can tell this bond is created in active-backup mode. This means that if your primary network interface drops for any reason, the IPMI controller will failover to the secondary network interface. The only way to get it to fail back over to the primary network interface is to briefly down the secondary network interface. Resetting the BMC will have no effect (which is dumb).
• eth1 – This is used for the "dedicated" network option. If you're using this, you should definitely configure the IPMI controller to use it, and don't just rely on it's auto-detection of this.

Speaking of configuring the network mode, you have two options for this '1' or '2'. The documentation doesn't indicate which is which, but based on my testing '1' is shared networking, and '2' is dedicated networking. Seems silly they couldn't manage to put descriptions in for this.

SuperMike-II - Dell PowerEdge C6220, Xeon E5-2670 8C 2.600GHz, Infiniband QDR TOP500 Supercomputer Sites

Site: Louisiana State University

System URL: http://www.hpc.lsu.edu/systems/system.php?system=Supermike2

Manufacturer: Dell

Cores: 7,040

Linpack Performance (Rmax) 110.93 TFlop/s

Theoretical Peak (Rpeak) 146.432 TFlop/s

Power: 200.00 kW

Memory: 14,080 GB Interconnect: Infiniband QDR

Operating System: Linux

Compiler: GCC, gfortran

Math Library: Intel MKL 11.339.sp1

MPI: OpenMPI 1.6

Recommended Links

Dell page

• PowerEdge C6220 II Rack Server Dell
• PowerEdge C6220 II Spec SheetPDF
• Dell PowerEdge C6220: CentOS-based LAMP Performance for Large InfrastructuresPDF
• Dell PowerEdge C6220 and Ubuntu LAMP Reference ArchitecturePDF
• Dell PowerEdge C6220 and FreeBSD AMP Reference ArchitecturePDF
• Dell PowerEdge C6220 and CentOS LAMP Reference ArchitecturePDF

Docs

• http://ftp.dell.com/manuals/all-products/esuprt_ser_stor_net/esuprt_cloud_products/poweredge-c6220-2_Reference%20Guide_en-us.pdf
• poweredge-c6220-2_Owner's Manual_en-us.pdf
• poweredge-c6220_Deployment Guide9_en-us.pdf
• poweredge-c6220_Owner's Manual2_en-us.pdf

YouTube

• PowerEdge C6220 Rack Server - YouTube

Deployment examples

• Chengdu University of Information Technology (CUIT) collaborates with Dell to devise energy efficient VDIPDF
• Huevocartoon Producciones deploys powerful render farm for 3-D animation productionPDF
• National Institute of Informatics (NII)PDF
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• EMD InternationalPDF
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• ACK STORMPDF
• CERNPDF
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• Blue ZooPDF

Etc

• net.DE ensures its customers uptime with energy efficient cloud serversPDF
• PowerEdge Portfolio BrochurePDF
• PowerEdge C6220 Spec SheetPDF
• Dell PowerEdge C6220: Powerful, streamlined, and efficientPDF
• Dell PowerEdge C6220 Technical Guide PDF
• PowerEdge C6220 II Technical Guide PDF
• PowerEdge C6220 Spec SheetPDF
• PowerEdge C6220 II Spec SheetPDF
• PowerEdge C6220 II Spec SheetPDF

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Last modified: March 12, 2019