Dell PowerEdge T420 Review
The Dell PowerEdge T420 is a powerful and reliable two-socket tower server that delivers performance and built-in capacity for non-disruptive growth. The T420’s acoustical profile fits unobtrusively into quiet office environments and data centers alike. An excellent fit for general-purpose small and medium business workloads such as database, file and print sharing, retail and email, the T420 also fulfills platform needs in small offices with virtual desktop infrastructure. Hot pluggability of key components, combined with leading manageability, make it an excellent server for branch offices and other remote sites that may not have IT staffing. Consistent worldwide support makes it highly appealing to multinational businesses and organizations with remote offices.
A versatile workhorse
Featuring the extensive performance of the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2400 and E5-2400 v2 product families, and complemented by substantial memory capacity and broad I/O bandwidth, the T420 provides high, balanced performance and built-in room for growth. Its twelve DIMM slots and six PCI Express® (PCIe) slots provide memory density and wide I/O bandwidth to support both memory-intensive and data-intensive applications and databases. Built-in capacity for up to eight 3.5- inch or sixteen 2.5-inch hard drives accommodate data storage as your business or organization grows. These combined technology features are necessary to support consolidated and virtualized environments, a role in which the T420 also shines. To protect your virtualized workloads, the T420 offers dual SD media making your hypervisors redundant and failsafe. Other reliability and availability features include hot-plug hard drives, both hardware and software RAID options, redundant fans and hot-plug power supplies.
Enterprise-wide systems management
PowerEdge embedded management technology, Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller 7 (iDRAC7) with Lifecycle Controller, helps IT administrators manage Dell servers in physical, virtual, local and remote environments — agent-free or with a systems management software agent installed. iDRAC7 Enterprise features include a multi-admin virtual console, virtual media and remote file share that enable IT admins to operate servers “as if they were there,” ensuring secure access to servers from anywhere in the world. OpenManage Essentials, a comprehensive monitoring and management console available as a no-charge software download, simplifies and automates basic hardware management tasks while Dell SupportAssist helps you maintain a healthy and productive environment.
