Dell PowerEdge R410 review

The price included a pair of 2.13GHz L5506 Xeons mounted with chunky passive heatsinks. These belong to the entry-level group of Intel's new Series 5500 quad-core Xeons, and have a few features missing. The L5506 doesn't offer the Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost features, and only supports DDR3 memory speeds up to 800MHz.

However, the L5506 does have a low TDP of 60W, which made its presence felt in our power tests. With the system in standby we measured it consuming only 7W, and with Windows Server 2008 idling this rose to 115W. With SiSoft Sandra pushing all eight physical cores to the max, we saw this rise to 188W. To put these results into perspective, we measured an HP ProLiant DL360 G6 drawing 7W, 100W and 157W for the same tests, although the review model had only a single E5530 Xeon processor.

Our server came with a 480W cold-swap power supply, but you can add power redundancy and go for a pair of 500W hot-plug models. The R410 offers two embedded Gigabit ports, but if you want more then you'll have to use the PCI Express slot to achieve this.

Remote management is a must have in rack-dense environments, and Dell offers a number of options. The motherboard has an embedded BMC that provides basic remote command-line access to power controls. Think carefully if you want more, as Dell offers two separate options for full remote management.

The iDRAC6 Express card in the review system fits into a proprietary socket at the back of the mainboard and shares the first network port to provide web browser access to the server. This also includes Dell's unique Lifecycle Controller, which delivers Dell's UEFI (unified extensible firmware interface) environment offering OS deployment wizards, a driver store, diagnostics and server update tools.

Dell's iDRAC6 Enterprise adds KVM over IP remote control and an integral V-Flash media slot that allows the server to be booted from an SD memory card. This is installed in a separate slot, where it provides a dedicated network management port at the rear.

For general systems management Dell includes its Management Console software. We took a closer look at this in our review of the PowerEdge R610, and were impressed with the level of management and monitoring features.

The R410 on review offers a reasonable specification along with plenty of choices for remote management and monitoring. As an entry-level server it fits the bill nicely.

Author: Dave Mitchell