Network – Dell PowerEdge T310 Review

Dell has offered its Dell PowerEdge T310 server just as one SMB server-and it’s a large amount of server for a small business. This beefy server is great for mission-critical operations like financial databases, high volume e-mail servers, or web servers executing a lot of transactions. It may also support virtualization, though it only supports Microsoft’s Hyper-V and some versions of VMware ESX and ESX1. The server delivers enterprise features to the SMB including high availability, fault tolerance, and embedded management capabilities. It is a powerful server, and it’s priced accordingly. The highest-end enterprise features will set you back $4,496.00 list, slightly pricier than HP’s Proliant ML330 G6 ($2,624, 4 stars) that has similar functionality.

network

The system we reviewed came with Intel’s quad-core Xeon x3470 2.93 GHz processor, four SAS drives configured with RAID 10 and 8 GB of 1333 MHz dual ranked UDIMM memory-the memory is expandable as much as 23 GB. The server is also to be found in less pricier configurations starting at $549.00.

Specifications
Operating System : Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Small Business Server 2008
Tested Storage Capacity : 146 GB
Rack-mount or Standalone : Standalone
Hard Disk Configuration : RAID
Wired Network Speed : 10/100/1000
Network Medium : Wired

Capabilities and Management
The PowerEdge T310 is a one-socket tower form factor. This isn’t a server you are going to want running near your workspace, at least with four drives installed. It’s rather noisy, especially on boot up. We found the same thing with last year’s Dell PowerEdge T110. The T310 also is a big tower measuring 17.3 x 8.6 x 20.5 inches. It’s heavy, too, tipping the scales at a good 50 pounds.

dell poweredge t110

The chassis has a total of 8 USB ports, a VGA port and a serial port. Several physical security features are built on the case: a process coin lock under the cover latch, in addition to a bezel lock on the front bezel. One design feature you can really like: once the server is running, the ability switch becomes useless. It can’t be pressed accidently or not satisfying you and eliminating the running server. That’s good, because the proper way to shut down a server is through the OS. We also like the Intrusion Switch, which beeps to alert users when the cover is open.

Management
A lot of happening with this server in terms of management. On boot up, administrators can opt to access the Unified Server Configurator, a console from which to perform firmware
updates, configure RAID, and manage other system settings. Embedded management is handled with the Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC), a system management
hardware and software solution that utilizes the integrated system-on-chip microprocessor. The Lifecycle Controller is an additional feature delivered by iDRAC which aids in delivering
faster server deployment and update capabilities from a bare-metal state.

As the server boots, the screen displays several utility options you can choose from-almost too many. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the options fly by too fast by default
during boot-up to read all of them at once-even though boot-up itself is rather slow. We clocked an average of 3.5 minutes and even longer for shutdown, due to an abundance of
running Windows services.