Dell PowerEdge R510 review

Dell has spotted a gap in the rack server market and intends to fill it with its latest PowerEdge R510. Many small businesses need plenty of storage in their racks, but few can afford to invest in costly Fibre Channel SANs. Storage servers come into their own in these environments and the R510 offers some unique features.

Storage capacity is a key focus, but at only 24in deep, the R510’s chassis is much shorter than standard rack servers, making it an interesting alternative for space-restricted server rooms.

The front panel has room for up to eight hot-swap hard disks, with the metal carriers accepting 3.5in or 2.5in drives, while Dell’s optional RAID controllers support a mixture of SAS and SATA. You can keep initial costs down by opting for four bays, where the hard disks are cabled directly to the motherboard’s SATA interfaces.

Upgrading to eight bays requires a Dell PCI Express RAID card. We had the SAS 6/iR variant, which came with 256MB of cache. Dell also offers a 512MB cache version and an optional battery backup pack. There’s more on the horizon, as Dell plans to expand the R510 with even more drive bays, so it might be prudent to wait if you want more than eight drives.

You have three remote management options, with the base R510 offering an embedded IPMI 2 BMC. This shares the first network port and supports access via a command-line shell, from where you can reboot the server and control its power supply.

Next up is Dell’s iDRAC 6 Express card, which snaps into a proprietary socket on the motherboard and shares the first network port to provide web-browser access to the server. This brings Dell’s unique Lifecycle Controller into play, which adds the 1GB of NVRAM memory used to store drivers and other software for immediate access.

The iDRAC 6 Enterprise version is a different card that fits into a separate socket on the motherboard. It presents a dedicated network management port and an advanced feature set, which includes KVM-over-IP functions and an integral V-Flash media slot. When an SD card is inserted, it appears as a boot option and can be accessed from the host operating system.

Dell’s UEFI (unified extensible firmware interface) is provided as standard, but without the iDRAC 6 cards and their NVRAM you won’t have a driver repository. So when you use the UEFI to install an OS on a base system, you’ll need a USB stick inserted in one of the two internal ports for extra storage.

The server also comes with Dell’s new Management Console software, although for small sites this Altiris-based product is too heavyweight. Note also that the Altiris Notification Server at its foundation won’t support Server 2008 as a host platform until later this year.

The server has a riser card with four PCI Express slots. The front one is set aside for the RAID card and the three rear slots accept full-height, half-length cards. Virtualisation isn’t an area of interest, as the R510 supports only 64GB of memory and doesn’t have the internal SD memory card slot offered by the R610 and R710 models.

Internally, everything looks neat and tidy, with the two processor sockets staggered down the motherboard for improved cooling and each partnered by six DIMM sockets. These are covered by a large plastic air shroud, and cooling is handled by a row of five cold-swap fans, which generated very low noise levels.

You have two choices for power. The review system was fitted with a single 1,100W hot-plug supply, which can be augmented with a second. With the four-drive model you can cut costs and go for a single 480W cold-swap supply.

The R510 on review was equipped with a pair of 2.26GHz L5520 Xeons offering a low TDP of 60W, which delivered good results in our power consumption tests. With the server in standby our inline meter recorded 11W, and with Server 2008 running in idle this rose to 115W.

The R510 has a lot of features and is a good choice for businesses requiring a high local-storage capacity in their rack. Strong competition comes from HP’s ProLiant DL380 G6, but the R510 is more compact and the forthcoming model with more drive bays will match it closely for capacity.

SMBs with a hunger for storage, a tight budget and limited rack space will find the new PowerEdge R510 could be what they’ve been looking for. It doesn’t compromise on features and the planned future models will have an even higher storage potential.

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