Description

Administrators can rely on the dependability and scalability offered by Dell’s PowerEdge line of servers, and the Dell PowerEdge R620 server is no exception. With powerful Intel Xeon E5-2600 processors, this system is designed for handling virtualization, work group collaboration, and high performance computing with ease.

Performance

Intel’s C602 chipset supports one, or a maximum of two Intel Xeon E5-2600 or E5-2600 v2 processors with up to 12 cores each. The Xeon E5-2600 v2 processors offer up to 40% greater performance compared to the previous generation E5-2600 processors. Administrators can start out with just one processor, and quickly scale to support two processors as business needs change. Dell’s suite of management tools including OpenManage and iDRAC7 make it easy for administrators to manage the system on site or remotely out of band. Choose from 495W, 750W or 1100W platinum power supplies.

Storage

The Dell R620 server supports a maximum of 10TB of storage using 10 x 2.5-inch drives. SAS, SATA HDD or SSD drives are compatible with the system. An alternate configuration supports four hot-plug SAS, SATA HDDs or SSDs plus two PCIe SSDs. Nearline SAS/ SATA and self-encrypting drives are also supported on the R620. The chassis that cannot be reconfigured after purchase to support the other configuration, so choose wisely. The R620 also supports a failsafe hypervisor with the addition of an optional dual SD module with one card in mirror mode.

Memory

With two processors, the system supports 24 DDR3 registered DIMM (RDIMM), unbuffered DIMM (UDIMM), or load reduced DIMM (LRDIMM) memory modules. Using 24 64GB LRDIMM memory modules with two processors will enable up to 1.5TB of total memory and transfer speeds of up to 1866MHz when paired with a compatible E5-2600 v2 processor. Transfer speeds will default to the slowest performer between the memory and CPU.

Expansion

Depending on your choice of chassis configuration, this server will support two or three PCIe 3.0 expansion slots. The ten-bay system is available only with a three PCIe slot option. Dell’s flexible NIC technology allows administrators to choose a network fabric technology to support their work flow and I/O performance without using one of the PCIe slots on the system board. This leaves expansion slots to be filled with additional NICs to increase I/O bandwidth, optional PERC8 RAID controllers for increased performance, or GPUs for enhanced processing. The integrated software RAID controller supports RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10. For more RAID options, administrators can choose from several PERC8 controllers that support the full range of RAID options.

Management

iDRAC7 and OpenManage Essentials are standard equipment on this system, granting administrators out of band access to the hardware on site or remotely using a standard browser. Upgrading to iDRAC7 Express or Enterprise can be done with the purchase of a license key and provides administrators with more management tools.

Summary

The Dell PowerEdge R620 rack server is an impressive general purpose platform that can be applied to a wide range of applications. With its small footprint and powerful performance, it’s a perfect fit in a space constrained data center. It features a number of Dell’s RAS (Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability) features including hot-pluggable drives, power supplies and fans, along with a redundant hypervisor and easy to use embedded management features.