PowerEdge 2550

In the midmarket rack optimized server market, performance and features are the battle cry, but Dell seems to have taken a different approach with its PowerEdge 2550 server.The PowerEdge 2550's 1-GHz processors pushed it in front of the HP LP2000r, but were slightly behind the DL380.The 2550 had an average feature set. Not great, but for the price, it's hard to argue. The RAID controller hardware comes standard on all PowerEdge 2550 motherboards, but you have to enable the option by inserting a 1-by-1-inch card into the motherboard. There are no external SCSI ports on the chassis.The 2550 has two load-balancing redundant power supplies for power fault tolerance. A few changes such as externally accessible power supplies, hot-swap PCI slots, 66-MHz PCI slots and built-in Ethernet ports from the same vendor would have made the Dell score higher.