System Overview; Introduction - Dell PowerEdge R520 Technical Manual

1 System overview

Introduction

The Dell™ PowerEdge™ R520 is a two-socket, 2U rack-mount server offering an excellent balance
of processing power, storage capacity and redundancy. The R520's price per performance,
configuration flexibility and headroom for growth make it highly appealing for consolidation and
virtualization, web serving and hosting, departmental database applications such as business
analytics and a wide range of general-purpose collaboration and productivity applications.
Designed for demanding workloads
The extensive memory, storage and I/O capacities of the R520 make it ideal for consolidation and
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virtualization. Delivering the performance of the Intel Xeon processor E5-2400 and E5-2400 v2
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product families and complemented by up to 12 DIMMs, up to four PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0-enabled
slots and up to eight internal hard drives, the R520 delivers powerful, balanced performance. With
built-in redundancy features, the R520 is a trustworthy platform for your business-critical databases
and applications. The dense rack form factor and innovative systems management of the R520 allow
you to save space and to use your IT administrator's time efficiently.
Manage and secure your data
Features that protect your business data and keep the server running are essential. The extensive
storage capacity of the R520 can be protected with both hardware RAID controllers and software
solutions to protect your data and ensure that it is readily available. Built-in reliability, availability and
serviceability (RAS) features such as hot-pluggable hard drives and power supplies minimize the
need to disrupt production work to take a server offline in the event of a component failure.
Redundant, failsafe hypervisors also add an additional layer of protection for virtualized
environments.
Simplified systems management, without compromise
The Dell OpenManage™ systems management portfolio includes Integrated Dell Remote Access
Controller 7 (iDRAC7) with Lifecycle Controller. This embedded feature helps IT administrators
manage Dell servers in physical, virtual, local and remote environments, operating in-band or out-
of-band, with or without a systems management software agent installed.
OpenManage iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller integrates and connects to leading third-party
systems management solutions (such as those from Microsoft, VMware and BMC Software), so users
can maintain a single point of control and capitalize on an existing systems management investment.
OpenManage simplifies the lifecycle of deploying, updating, monitoring and maintaining Dell
PowerEdge servers.