Remote management
Dell gives you a choice of network ports as the R820 has a proprietary slot at the rear which accepts Broadcom and Intel based NIC daughtercards. The review system came with an Intel quad-port Gigabit card but you can opt for a version with dual 10GBase-T/dual Gigabit ports which includes FCoE offload on the 10GbE ports.
There's plenty of room to expand as even with the RAID card in residence, there are still six PCI-e Gen3 slots available. Dell is moving into VDI applications and offers NVIDIA Q2000 GPU cards for the R820.
Along with the iDRAC7, you can remotely monitor the server via the browser based OpenManage Server Administrator
For remote management you can start with Dell's new iDRAC7 management controller. This slick web interface easily matches HP's iLO3 when it comes to features. If you want remote control and virtual media services you need to upgrade to the Enterprise version which has been made much easier as all the hardware is already in place and just requires a software key to activate it.
Overall
Dell is vying closely with HP for the second spot in the worldwide 4P server market, according to analysts at IDC. The PowerEdge R820 undoubtedly strengthens Dell's position as it is superbly designed and is the first Xeon E5-4600 system.
Verdict
The PowerEdge R820 showcases Intel’s latest E5-4600 Xeons in a superbly built system packed with features. The modest dimensions will appeal to space constrained data centres looking a balanced combination of processing density, high memory capacity, low power consumption and value.
Chassis: 2U rack CPU: 4 x 2.2GHz Xeon E5-4607 Memory: 96GB 1.35V DDR3 expandable to 1.5TB (LR-DIMMs) Storage: 5 x 300GB Dell SAS 2 SFF 15K hot-swap hard disks (max. 16) RAID: Dell PERC H710P with 1GB NVRAM cache Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 6 Expansion: 7 x PCI-e Gen3 slots Network: 4 x Gigabit Power: 2 x 1100W hot-plug supplies Management: Dell iDRAC7 Enterprise with 10/100 and 8GB vFlash card Software: Dell Management Console Warranty: 3yrs on site NBD
