System Overview; Introduction - Dell PowerEdge R420 Technical Manual

1 System overview

Introduction

The Dell™ PowerEdge™ R420 is a 2- socket, 1U rack- mount server offering powerful performance
and scalability in a dense 1U rack form factor. It is an excellent fit for compute- intense applications
and high- performance computing (HPC) workloads. The R420's low profile also makes it highly
attractive for departmental email, workgroup collaboration, and file and print in space- constrained
environments at departmental or remote sites of large businesses and public organizations.
Performance and reliability combined for confidence
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The R420 features the extensive performance of two Intel Xeon E5- 2400 processors. Powerful
processors alone, however, are not enough to deliver balanced performance. Compute power must
be combined with sufficient memory and I/O bandwidth to prevent performance bottlenecking. The
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R420 complements its processors with 12 DIMM slots and two PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0- enabled
I/O slots, providing a substantial memory footprint and wide I/O bandwidth to support both
memory- intensive and data- intensive applications and databases. These combined technology
features are also key design requirements when supporting consolidated and virtualized
environments, a role the R420 fits well. To protect your virtualized workloads, the R420 offers dual,
redundant SD media making your hypervisors redundant and failsafe. Other reliability and availability
features include up to four 3.5- inch or eight 2.5- inch hot- plug hard drives, both hardware and
software RAID options, and redundant, hot- plug power supplies.
The PowerEdge server line
The PowerEdge family is engineered with the right combination of features and performance
scalability to handle tough workloads for both large and small data center environments.
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. The OpenManage systems
management portfolio also integrates and connects to third- party systems management solutions
so you can maintain your single point of control and capitalize on your existing investment.
OpenManage simplifies the lifecycle of deploying, updating, monitoring, and maintaining your Dell
PowerEdge servers.
5 PowerEdge R420 Technical Guide