Integrating Next Generation Platforms with EDGE and TELCO Server Innovations

7 min readMar 7, 2024

With IoT and 5G, mobility has almost become an essential part of our lives. Autonomous vehicles, wearable technology, smart monitoring and management, and many hardware and services both individually and commercially constitute the basic components of EDGE Computing. With 5G, individual and enterprise mobility has almost evolved and the infrastructure standards and needs of next generation technologies have started to completely differentiate. IT server manufacturers have recognized this market and started to produce new server types that I will talk about in a moment. The concept of rugged now includes servers along with handheld terminals, computers and phones.

Depending on the usage scenarios, these servers must be able to fully meet the needs of the industry. The most important of these is ruggedness and operability. It must be able to withstand all external influences, such as temperature, vibration, humidity, electromagnetic and shock, and provide uninterrupted service. It should also fully support hardware compatible with today’s technologies.

In this article, I will focus on the DELL PowerEdge XR4000 and XR8000 as an IT server manufacturer. Other well-known server vendors such as HPE and Lenovo have similar solutions. The reason for DELL is that it offers many different alternatives for many different use cases. I will give an overview of HCI EDGE Computing and RAN.

I will also talk about how software platform architectures are integrated into these servers at a basic level.

DELL PowerEdge XR4000
An HCI solution for EDGE computing, it is a multi-mode server model available in both rack mount and DIN-VESA formats.

As a rack mount, it comes in standard 2U2N, 2U3N and 2U4N form factors and can be configured with a dedicated witness node.

As a DIN-VESA mount, it is almost slightly larger than a router. It can be configured with a maximum of 2 1U nodes and a dedicated witness node.

As an HCI, DELL can be used with VMware vSAN Ready Node, Azure Stack HCI or you can use it as a full stack DELL VxRail.

Option 1: Rack-Mount XR4000r

Option 2: DIN-VESA XR4000z

DIN Mount Kit

VESA Mount Kit

Dedicated vSAN Witness Node
It can be integrated for both XR4000r and XR4000z as a vSAN Stretched Cluster Hardware Witness Node for EDGE Computing HCI. It is a mini-server used at the basic level required for vSAN Witness Virtual Appliance (4 Core Intel Atom C3508 CPU and 16GB DDR4 RDIMM).

NOTE: Witness Node cannot be used as a basic standard hypervisor. It is designed to provide dedicated resources for Witness. It is shipped with ESXi installed or can be reset and reused.

Witness Node can be centrally managed through IDRAC.

Technical Specifications

AC and DC power supplies available in all chassis types.

1U and 2U nodes can be configured with 3rd Generation Xeon D-Series CPU and there is a maximum of one CPU socket per node (maximum 20 cores supported per CPU socket)

1U and 2U nodes support a maximum of 128GB and 3200 MT/s per DIMM with a maximum of 4 DIMM slots.

2 single-width GPUs (NVIDIA A2) or 1 double-width GPU (NVIDIA A30) available on 2U node

M2 BOSS card for OS/Hypervisor and 4 M.2 NVMe slots available on 1U and 2U nodes

Maximum supported capacity per M.2 NVMe for 1U and 2U nodes as a capacity disk is 3.84 TB.

It can be configured with 10G, 25G, 100G NIC options for 1U and 2U nodes and also with 100/200G Pensando DPU.

Reverse Airflow (RAF) or Normal Airflow (NAF) thermal and N+1 FAN redundancy is supported.

When fully configured, the XR4000r weighs 17.83 kg and the XR4000z weighs 12.16 kg.

XR4510c (1U Node)

XR4520c (2U Node)

XR4520c (2U Node) PCIe Riser

PCIe Connection Diagram

Supported Operating Systems for 1U and 2U Nodes

Azure Stack HCI
Canonical Ubuntu Server LTS
Microsoft Windows Server with Hyper-V
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
VMware ESXi

Supported Operating Systems for Hardware Witness Node

Azure Stack HCI
VMware ESXi

Environmental Standards

A sample EDGE Compute Stack Architecture (SD-WAN, HCI and Micro-Services)

NOTE: XR4000 supports VMware vSAN ESA architecture. (ALL-NVME HCI)

Supported ESXi versions

PowerEdge XR8000

The XR8000 multi-node chassis offers higher endurance and compute capacity than the XR4000. It is designed to support AI/ML workloads with TELCO RAN.

It can be configured as a rack mount in standard 2U2N, 2U3N, 2U4N form factor. This chassis is not suitable for HCI. Fully designed for Distributed Unit (DU), Centralized Unit (CU), vRAN and Open RAN, Distributed RAN, Network Edge and MEC, Cloud Services, AI Inference and Field Operations workloads.

Technical Specifications

AC and DC power supplies available in all chassis types.

1U and 2U nodes can be configured with 4th generation Xeon series CPU and there is a maximum of one CPU socket per node (maximum 32 cores supported per CPU socket)

1U and 2U nodes support a maximum of 64GB and 4800MT/s per DIMM with a maximum of 8 DIMM slots.

2 single-width GPUs (NVIDIA A2) or 1 double-width GPU (NVIDIA A30) available on 2U node

M2 BOSS card and 2 M.2 NVMe slots available for OS/Hypervisor on 1U and 2U nodes.

Maximum supported capacity per NVMe disk is 1.92TB with 2 Dual M.2 Direct Connect NVMe disk slots for 2U node as capacity disk.

It can be configured with 10G, 25G, 100G NIC options for 1U and 2U nodes and also with 100/200G Pensando DPU.

N+1 fan redundancy with reverse airflow (RAF) is supported.
The XR8000 weighs 18.52 kg when fully configured.

XR8610t (1U Node)