Here's a quick video review:
Mar 4, 2014
Product version discussed: Dell PowerEdge M420
Good for virtualization and has servicing advantages
This is a dual cpu socket, quarter-height blade server capable of being deployed in a sleeve of 4 nodes in a full height blade slot for up to 32 individual nodes in a single M1000e blade enclosure and is able to provide exceptionally high compute density or node count for virtualized environments. In addition, each node operates independently of each other and can be individually serviced. Also, the m1000e retains the ability to mix different types of PowerEdge M series servers.
The M420 uses the Intel C602 chipset for using Intel Xeon E5-2400 and 2400 V2 series chips with up to 16 processing cores per node.
This server has a total of 6 DIMM slots with 3 memory channels per CPU and is able to use memory with speeds of up to 1600 MT/s (mega transfers per second) with module sizes of 2, 4, 8, 16, and 32 GBs DDR3 registered or Low voltage RAM, for a total of 192 GBs possible per node. Dual or Quad rank modules can be used in the slots and modules populated from the outside in.
On the front of the bezel are 2 USB ports, power button, blade release handle, and slots for 2, hot pluggable 1.8” uSATA (universal SATA) SSDs.
This server comes with an embedded PERC H310 RAID controller featuring 6Gbits per second of throughput on a dedicated connection to the system board with RAID 0 and 1 capabilities.
One mezzanine slot is available for I/O expansion card options that include 1Gbit and 10Gbit adapters, Infiniband or Fibre Channel interfaces on a PCIe 3.0 bus. The M420 also features a LOM (LAN on motherboard) riser in the Broadcom dual port 10Gbit controller. You’ll need to populate the rear I/O modules with the right types of switches to utilize your server’s network capabilities.
The power and cooling for the M420 is drawn from the M1000e enclosure which can hold up to 6 2700W hot-plug power supplies.
This is a 10U modular chassis capable of holding up to 32 quarter-height blade servers such as the M420.
Empty, the chassis weighs 98 lbs., fully loaded this modular can weigh a total of 394 lbs.!
The maximum weight of a M420 server is 26 lbs. and is 3.8 inches tall, 2 inches wide, and 21.5 inches deep.
Each blade can be remotely managed with iDRAC7 Express for Blades with Lifecycle Controller, or with a software upgrade license, iDRAC7 Enterprise for greater control options.
The M420 can run various Windows Server Operating Systems as well as LINUX Red Hat Enterprise.
For virtualized environments XenServer 6.1, Red Hat Virtualization 3.1, and vSphere 4.1 and up are also available. Here is a lively video overview of this review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKIG430z0PI
*Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
