Dell PowerEdge R420 review

With Intel’s new Xeon E5-2600 processors hogging the limelight, it’s easy to forget that there’s a lower-cost alternative. Showcasing the capabilities of Intel’s more affordable Xeon E5-2400 CPUs, Dell’s PowerEdge R420 is aimed at SMBs looking for a powerful entry-level rack server with plenty of expansion potential. It’s primed for virtualisation, workgroup collaboration, email, web and file serving – but also as a low-profile compute node for data centres.

Physically, the R420 isn’t as deep as Dell’s flagship R620 1U rack server, but it crams a decent specification and plenty of storage capacity into a well-designed 1U rack chassis. The front panel includes an optical drive, two USB ports and Dell’s nifty LCD panel and control pad. This displays the server’s status and can be used to set the remote management network address and view power consumption and system temperatures.

Inside, the twin CPU sockets house a pair of 2.1GHz E5-2450 processors. These eight- core CPUs have an 8GT/sec QPI, a 20MB L3 cache and support for RDIMM memory speeds of up to 1,600MHz. The key differences between these CPUs and the E5-2600 Xeons are that they use the Socket-B2 (LGA1356) package, which reduces costs with a single inter-socket QPI link. They have three DDR3 memory channels and support six DIMMs for each occupied processor socket, which limits the maximum memory to 192GB.

Six dual-rotor fans behind the drive backplane keep the server cool. Unlike the R620’s, they’re not hot-swappable, but they’re quiet, making the R420 a good choice for a small office.

Storage is well catered for. There’s room for eight hot-swap SATA or SAS SFF hard disks, and the price includes a pair of 300GB SAS 2 drives. Of course, you can always cut storage costs by opting for a base system with four LFF drives cabled directly to the motherboard’s SATA port. In this instance, RAID is provided by an embedded PERC S110, which supports software-managed stripes, mirrors and RAID5 arrays.

Our system had the PERC H710P Mini card, which fits in a dedicated slot next to a pair of embedded four-port SAS 2 connectors. It has 1GB of DDR3 NVRAM cache memory and supports RAID6 for 6Gbits/sec SAS and SATA drives. And since the RAID controller is based on LSI’s SAS2208 chip, you can activate its CacheCade feature, which uses SSDs as a high-speed cache for improved read speeds.

The R420 has dual Gigabit network ports but, unlike the R620, there’s no room for an extra daughtercard. Even so, two PCI Express Gen 3 slots are available and Dell offers a good choice of Gigabit, 10GbE and Fibre Channel upgrade cards.

The PowerEdge R420 beats HP and IBM for virtualisation features thanks to its dual SD media card. This fits next to the H710P RAID card and keeps an onboard copy of the primary boot media for full hypervisor redundancy.

We’re pleased to see that Dell has spruced up its system setup interface. It’s now separated into sections for configuring the server, the iDRAC7 controller and other devices such as the network ports and RAID controller.

Dell’s iDRAC7 handles remote server management, and is just a whisker behind HP’s iLO4 controller. The web interface has also received a welcome upgrade, and provides more information than its predecessor. As well as more detail about storage, its power-monitoring features offer real-time and historical graphs of consumption. Better still, the Enterprise hardware upgrade is already present and needs only a licence key to activate its dedicated network port, vFlash slot, remote control and virtual media services.

Dell supplied our system with two 550W hotplug platinum-rated power supplies, but for lighter duties you can opt for 350W models. The system’s power consumption could be better, though: with Windows Server 2008 R2 in idle we measured a draw of only 92W; at full load that figure rocketed to 252W.

There’s much to like here, but at almost £1,000 more than Boston’s Value Smart 360 G8, Dell’s PowerEdge R420 struggles to compete, 
despite superior hardware and a more convincing suite of storage options.