Dell PowerEdge R410 review

Dell’s 11th generation of rack servers has delivered some innovative designs, with its PowerEdge R610 taking a well-deserved place on the PC Pro A List. The R610 is Dell’s flagship 1U rack server, and in this review we move the focus to its new entry-level PowerEdge R410.

This compact system is offered as a starter 1U rack server for small businesses, but also has a keen eye on HPC, grid computing and rendering apps. The system was supplied with only a quartet of 250GB SATA hard disks fitted in cold-swap carriers, but Dell offers plenty of other options. You can go for 3.5in or 2.5in SAS or SATA drives, and opt for hot-swap capabilities as well.

The base model has no RAID functions, as the drives are cabled through to the motherboard’s embedded SATA interfaces. Along with a x16 PCI Express slot, the single riser card at the rear has a proprietary slot at its base that accepts Dell’s SAS 6/iR or PERC 6/i cards. We had the former, which uses an LSI SAS1068E SAS controller chip and supports stripes and mirrors.

The SAS 6/iR card activates the four-port connector on the riser card, allowing it to be cabled directly through to each drive using a fan-out cable. Usefully, the cables use combined SATA/power sockets, making it easier to remove the cold-swap drives. If you want RAID5 or 6 arrays, you need to add a PERC 6/i card instead.

Along with the four drive bays, the front panel has room for a DVD-ROM drive, a couple of USB ports and a simple LED status panel. You can opt for the backlit LCD version, which has a control keypad for setting the remote management network address and scrolling through views of power consumption and temperatures.

If you want a swift rack installation, we recommend Dell’s optional ReadyRail kits. These add around £40 to the asking price, but make light work of this job.

The interior of the R410 affords good access to all components. The memory and processors are covered in a plastic shroud to improve airflow, and the four dual-rotor fan modules in front of the motherboard are quiet and unobtrusive.

The price included a pair of 2.13GHz L5506 Xeons mounted with chunky passive heatsinks. These belong to the entry-level group of Intel’s new Series 5500 quad-core Xeons, and have a few features missing. The L5506 doesn’t offer the Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost features, and only supports DDR3 memory speeds up to 800MHz.

However, the L5506 does have a low TDP of 60W, which made its presence felt in our power tests. With the system in standby we measured it consuming only 7W, and with Windows Server 2008 idling this rose to 115W. With SiSoft Sandra pushing all eight physical cores to the max, we saw this rise to 188W. To put these results into perspective, we measured an HP ProLiant DL360 G6 drawing 7W, 100W and 157W for the same tests, although the review model had only a single E5530 Xeon processor.

Our server came with a 480W cold-swap power supply, but you can add power redundancy and go for a pair of 500W hot-plug models. The R410 offers two embedded Gigabit ports, but if you want more then you’ll have to use the PCI Express slot to achieve this.

Remote management is a must have in rack-dense environments, and Dell offers a number of options. The motherboard has an embedded BMC that provides basic remote command-line access to power controls. Think carefully if you want more, as Dell offers two separate options for full remote management.

The iDRAC6 Express card in the review system fits into a proprietary socket at the back of the mainboard and shares the first network port to provide web browser access to the server. This also includes Dell’s unique Lifecycle Controller, which delivers Dell’s UEFI (unified extensible firmware interface) environment offering OS deployment wizards, a driver store, diagnostics and server update tools.

Dell’s iDRAC6 Enterprise adds KVM over IP remote control and an integral V-Flash media slot that allows the server to be booted from an SD memory card. This is installed in a separate slot, where it provides a dedicated network management port at the rear.

For general systems management Dell includes its Management Console software. We took a closer look at this in our review of the PowerEdge R610, and were impressed with the level of management and monitoring features.

The R410 on review offers a reasonable specification along with plenty of choices for remote management and monitoring. As an entry-level server it fits the bill nicely.

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