Dell PowerEdge R420 Review
The Dell PowerEdge R420 is a 2-socket, 1U rack-mount server offering an aggressive entry-price point combined with internal expandability, enabling configurations to be tailored to specific workloads and user requirements, and supporting growth through the life of the server. The R420 is an excellent fit specializing in departmental email, workgroup collaboration, web hosting, e-commerce and file and print in space-constrained environments and in departmental or remote sites of large businesses and public organizations. The R420 is also highly attractive for compute-intense applications in space-constrained areas, as well as high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. Consistent worldwide support makes it appealing to multinational businesses and organizations.
Performance and reliability combined for confidence
The R420 features the extensive performance of two Intel® Xeon® E5-2400 processors. Powerful processors alone, however, are not enough to deliver balanced performance. Compute power must be combined with sufficient memory and I/O bandwidth to prevent performance bottlenecking. The R420 complements its processors with 12 DIMMs and two PCI Express® (PCIe) 3.0-enabled expansion slots, providing a substantial memory footprint and wide I/O bandwidth to support both memory-intensive and data-intensive applications and databases. These combined technology features are also necessary to support consolidated and virtualized environments, a role the R420 fills well. To protect your virtualized workloads, the R420 offers dual SD media making your hypervisors redundant and failsafe. Other reliability and availability features include up to four 3.5-inch or eight 2.5-inch hot-plug hard drives, both hardware and software RAID options, and redundant, hot-plug power supplies.
The PowerEdge server line
The PowerEdge family is engineered with the right combination of features and performance scalability to handle tough workloads for both large and small data center environments. The Dell OpenManage™ systems management portfolio includes integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) with Lifecycle Controller. This embedded feature helps IT administrators manage Dell servers in physical, virtual, local and remote environments, operating in-band or out-of-band, with or without a systems management software agent. OpenManage also integrates and connects to third-party systems management solutions so you can maintain your single point of control and capitalize on your existing investment. OpenManage simplifies the lifecycle of deploying, updating, monitoring, and maintaining your Dell PowerEdge servers.
