Dell PowerEdge R710 review

When Dell launched its PowerEdge R610 rack server earlier this year, its superb build quality and features impressed enough to earn it a coveted Recommended award and a place on the PC Pro A List. Now, we turn our attention to the new PowerEdge R710, and see whether Dell’s latest 2U rack server continues this tradition.

The R710 has some stiff competition, pitched against HP’s mighty ProLiant DL380 G6. The R710 looks capable of tackling it head on, since it takes everything that makes the R610 great – including a sharp focus on reduced power consumption – and delivers Dell’s new centralised system management tools and the new Lifecycle Controller.

Embedded on the server’s motherboard, the Lifecycle Controller is a small black box containing 1GB of NVRAM memory. You can boot the server directly from this controller by selecting the System Services option in the boot menu, which loads Dell’s UEFI (unified extensible firmware interface) environment complete with GUI and support for mouse and keyboard.

Dell wins out for OS deployment, as the UEFI replaces Dell’s Server Assistant disc. It provides a built-in deployment wizard whereby you enter your details and leave the server to get on with installing your chosen OS.

The R710 sports Dell’s new iDRAC6 management controller, which has a dedicated network port at the rear of the server. It provides a web browser interface for remote monitoring and viewing the status of critical server components, and the Enterprise upgrade key brings in virtual boot media and KVM-over-IP remote access.

Based on Symantec’s Altiris Notification Server, the Management Console takes over from Dell’s elderly IT Assistant and provides the tools to manage all your IT equipment, instead of just Dell servers. Installation is a lengthy process, but it kicks off with an automated search process that populates its database with discovered systems and SNMP-enabled devices.

The Altiris agent can be pushed to selected systems and this provides enhanced inventory, system monitoring, remote management capabilities and extensive alerting facilities. However, power monitoring and management aren’t as good as HP’s Insight Control suite, where its optional Insight Power Manager plugin provides graphing and reporting facilities for power consumption, inlet air temperature and CPU performance.

Physically, the R710 sees a substantial redesign over the PowerEdge 2950, with the front panel covered by the menacing new grey bezel. It also has a new LCD panel offering a keypad for setting the remote management network address along with views of power consumption and temperatures.

In terms of internal storage capacity, the R710 supports up to eight SFF hot-swap hard disks – the DL380 G6 beats this hands down, as it has room for a second eight-drive bay. Plenty of RAID options are on offer, with the review system including a PERC 6/i controller kitted out with 256MB of embedded cache and a battery backup unit.

Underneath the easily removable lid you’ll find a small board on top of the optical drive with an SD memory card slot and a 1GB card installed. This is Dell’s answer to virtualisation fans, since this bootable device is specifically for embedded hypervisors. It currently supports only VMware’s ESXi, but we’ve been advised that Hyper-V is on the way.

Cooling is handled by a row of five hot-swap fan modules arranged across the front of the motherboard. During testing, we found the R710 to be unobtrusive – not as quiet as the R610, but hardly noticeable nonetheless.

You have two choices for power, with the review system fitted with a pair of 570W Energy Smart supplies. If performance is a higher priority you can opt for high output 870W modules. We found the R710 efficient here, with our inline power meter recording only 16W in standby and only 150W with Windows Server 2003 R2 running in idle. With SiSoft Sandra punishing all 16 logical cores, this rose to a peak of only 270W.

For general expansion options the server has two riser cards at the back, each with a pair of PCI Express slots. For network connections, the server sports four embedded Gigabit ports and these are TOE ready with the optional iSCSI offload upgrade.

The R710 doesn’t have the same high storage potential of the ProLiant DL380 G6 and HP’s management package includes superior power monitoring features. However, it’s well designed and built, comes very close for quality and value, and has the unique Lifecycle Controller, which offers superior server deployment tools.

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