IT Pro Verdict
The C6220 offers a high density rack with plenty of E5-2600 Xeon muscle under the covers. It comes with impressive power to processing ratio, but is not much cheaper than a set of standard 1U rack servers. Remote management features and build quality are also basic, which makes it hard to recommend.
Dell's C-Series of PowerEdge servers are used in large datacentres where power consumption and cooling are higher priorities pure performance.
Aimed at markets such as cloud hosting providers, the C6220 offers four completely independent, hot-swappable server nodes. The chassis also accepts a pair of dual-height nodes which have two PCI-e expansion slots.
The range has always had a high processing density and the latest PowerEdge C6220 crams four Xeon E5-2600 servers into a low profile 2U form factor.
The four nodes are accessed at the rear where each one provides dual Gigabit, IPMI, pairs of USB2, VGA and serial ports. They're easy enough to remove by releasing a small locking tab and sliding them out rearwards.
The four hot-swap server nodes are completely independent and have their own set of ports
Improved thermal design
The older PowerEdge C6100 could only support CPUs with a maximum TDP of 95W. With the C6220, Dell has rejigged the node's thermal design so the system can cope with TDPs up to 135W.
This means the entire range of E5-2600 Xeons is supported right up to the high performance 2.9GHz, 8-core E5-2690. The review system packs in a good processing density for the price as each node was supplied with dual 2.6GHz E5-2670 Xeons.
Memory options are more limited as each node has 16 DIMM sockets as opposed to the 24 sockets found in standard Xeon E5 servers. It also currently supports 16GB 1600MHz RDIMMs so maximum capacity per node is 256GB. LR (load reduced) DIMMs will not be supported but Dell aims to have 32GB RDIMM certified soon.
The node's IPMI controller offers a comparatively basic set of remote monitoring features
