Dell PowerEdge R620 review

For enterprise buyers looking for the ultimate in high-density servers, Dell’s 1U PowerEdge R620 is hard to beat. Part of the firm’s all new 12G line-up, based on Intel Xeon E5 (Sandy Bridge EP) processors, the R620 server has sockets for two Xeon E5-2600s supported by a massive 768GB of memory.

Surprisingly for a 1U platform, the R620 can also hold up to 10 hot-plug disks, adding to a comprehensive specification designed to fit the server to live hosting HPC, virtualisation and other demanding datacentre applications.

With years of experience under its belt Dell has got the build quality of its servers just about right, starting with an all-metal chassis on the R620, with an easily removable top panel for access and an obsessively neat layout beneath.

Designed for efficient airflow and minimal cabling, hot-swap parts, like a set of seven thermally-controlled fans, are clearly marked in orange with blue for components that need the power to be switched off before they can be swapped.

And while on the subject of power, there’s room for two redundant supplies at the back of the chassis, also hot-swappable with three output levels on offer (495, 750 and 1,100 Watts) to suit different configurations.

The review system came with a pair of 750Watt supplies to cope with demands of the top of the range Xeon E5-2690 processors fitted inside. Clocked at 2.9GHz and equipped with eight cores each, these are power hungry little beasts, with a TDP of 135 Watts with the result that, driven hard, the config we had consumed well over 400 Watts. Not a problem where performance is the goal; for energy-conscious buyers other, less demanding, processors are available.