Wednesday, December 6th, 2006By Bryan Richard

Dell yesterday announced the release of their new PowerEdge servers that focus on reducing datacenter power consumption through their "Smart Energy" technology.

Reducing environmental impact is really the biggest message that Dell is pushing with this release as you can see from CEO Kevin Rollin's (not too terribly convincing) video, challenging the industry to green itself. A noble effort, if a little surprising considering Wall Street's distaste for green companies and Dell's recent market troubles.

Dell's Energy Smart technology is comprised of power setting configurations, energy management software, and a collection of hardware that highlight just how much attention power consumption has been given by component manufacturers of late. These elements include:

Low-flow Fans Also know as variable speed fans that allow the fans to only spin to the degree needed by the system, rather than being either ON or OFF.

Dual-Core Intel Low Volt Xeon Processors Formally known as Woodcrest, these were Intel's first chips based on the Core microarchitecture. Release in June of this year, the chips in these PowerEdge servers have a Thermal Design Point (TDP) of 65W and Intel claims they have a 20% reduction in energy consumption over Pentium Ds.

High Efficiency Power Supply Draws less energy, keeping internal temperatures lower.

Taken all together in a small form-factor and configuration that increases the flow of air throughout the system, Dell claims their new machines will consume 25% less energy than earlier PowerEdge servers.

The new PowerEdge servers come in two flavors: the 1U 1950 series ($2,449) and 2U 2950 series ($2,619). Both use the Dual Core Intel Xeon 5148LV (4MB Cache, 2.33GHz, 1333MHz FSB) as the processor of choice for the Energy Smart configuration.

Bryan Richard is the VP of Community and Infrastructure for linuxdlsazine. You can find more articles by Bryan here. You can also follow him on Twitter or drop him a note.