Dell PowerEdge T110 review

Internally, everything is tidy with clear access to all components for upgrades. The processor is located in the centre of the chassis and mounted by a large passive aluminium heatsink. For cooling, the processor and heatsink are covered by a plastic shroud with a single fan at the rear, which also doubles up for the hard disks.

The network connection is handled by a single Gigabit port at the back but there is some extra room to upgrade. The motherboard has four PCI-Express slots and Dell offers single and dual-port Gigabit cards along with its hardware SAS RAID controllers.

Power is handled by a single fixed 350W unit and during testing we found the T110 to be easy on the supply. With Windows Server 2008 R2 Foundation in idle we recorded a power draw of only 48W and with SiSoft Sandra thrashing all eight logical processor cores we saw this peak at only 145W.

The T110 isn’t blessed with Dell’s unique Lifecycle Controller but you can boot into the System Services to access the UEFI (unified extensible firmware interface) environment, which offers OS deployment wizards and diagnostics tools.

For OS deployment using the UEFI you’ll need to have drivers available on a separate disk or an FTP site. You don’t get the embedded 1GB of NVRAM that comes with the Lifecycle Controller so drivers can’t be stored on the server. Dell’s iDRAC6 Express and Advanced cards are also not available for the T110.

What you do get is an embedded BMC (baseboard management controller), which shares the single network port and can be used to access the server remotely. Features are very basic as the bundled IPMISH command line utility only allows you to remotely control server power and view error logs.

As long as the system and OS are running you can use the bundled OpenManage Server Administrator. This provides local and remote browser access to the server with an interface that’s similar to that presented by Dell’s iDRAC6 controllers.

You can view the motherboard sensors and check on temperatures, voltages or cooling fan speed. The server can be turned on and off and gracefully rebooted although, obviously, if you switch it off it can only be remotely turned back on again via the command line utility.

Small businesses looking for their very first purpose-built server should shortlist the PowerEdge T110. It’s small and quiet, offers a good hardware package for the price and, as long as you’re aware of the limitations, can be sourced with Windows Server 2008 R2 Foundation.

Author: Dave Mitchell