Dell PowerEdge T410 review

There's plenty of room to expand, as the T410 has five PCI Express slots with only the lower one occupied by the RAID card. Usefully, the slots are located above the air shroud for easy access. The server also offers a pair of embedded Gigabit ports that can be teamed up for load-balanced and redundant links if required.

For server management, Dell offers a number of options. These start with the embedded IPMI controller, which offers simple remote command-line access to power controls. Next up is Dell's iDRAC 6 Express card, which snaps into a proprietary socket next to the PCI Express slots and shares the first network port to provide web browser access to the server.

More importantly, the iDRAC6 brings the unique Lifecycle Controller into play and provides access to Dell's UEFI (unified extensible firmware interface) environment, complete with GUI and support for a mouse and keyboard. This provides OS deployment wizards and a driver store, plus access to diagnostics and server update tools.

You can't upgrade to the iDRAC 6 Enterprise version, as this is a completely different card that fits into a separate socket further down the motherboard. It presents a dedicated network management port at the rear and an advanced feature set.

The Enterprise card adds KVM over IP functions, allowing the server to be remotely controlled, and also has an integral V-Flash media slot accessible at the rear of the chassis. When an SD card is inserted, it appears as a boot option that can be accessed from the host operating system.

The T410 also comes with Dell's latest Management Console software. We took a closer look at this is our review of the A-Listed PowerEdge R610 rack server, and were impressed with the level of features. However, it's a heavy-duty application, and small businesses running a single server are unlikely to need it.

The review system came with a fixed 525W power supply, but you can opt for a pair of 580W hot-plug models. With the single supply the T410 proved to be a power miser, with our inline meter recording only 6W in standby and 102W with Server 2003 R2 in idle. With SiSoft Sandra punishing all four Xeon cores, we saw this rise to a modest 175W under full load.

As a small office tower server, the T410 has a lot going for it - it's small enough to keep out of the way and is extremely quiet. It doesn't lose out to larger systems either, as it has plenty of expansion potential including good storage prospects.

Author: Dave Mitchell