Usefulness of Dell PowerEdge tower server for SMBs

The Dell PowerEdge is ideal for small and medium sized businesses which are looking for servers without the high end hardware configuration, along with enterprise level capabilities such as RAID and management utilities that they require for a reasonable price.

The good thing about Dell PowerEdge T110 II is that it is easily manageable and most importantly expandable so that small and medium sized companies can upgrade the configuration as required. In short, it is a server which allows virtualization, has in-built security attributes, the chassis can be accessed easily and comes with load of different features.

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Hardware Specifications

It is a tower server measuring 16 x 7.5 x 17 with weight of 28 pounds. It has one SATA hard disk drive of 1TB, 4GB of 133 MHz memory (UDIMM), Intel Xeon processor of 3.10 GHz and PERC RAID controller which supports RAID 1, 5 and 10. If you want, you can also select Intel Core i3-2100 processor in-place of Xeon processor. The server supports a maximum of 32GB RAM and this Dell PowerEdge makes use of virtualization technique from Intel. Using this technology it is possible to create virtual machines by consolidation of physical servers.

Other things that are part of hardware configuration include:

Front Panel: It has 1 DVD drive, 1 LED control panel and 2 USB ports.

  1. Control Panel: Here you will find details about system health and activity taking place on the drive and USB ports.
  2. LED Panel: This panel can show error signals at the time of startup which are color coded.

Security Features

You will find several security features in this Dell server which are not present in many of the other competing small and medium sized business servers.

  1. One such feature being the lockable entry latch present on side cover which secures hard drives. In case any one tries to tamper server’s cover, an intrusion alarm is automatically set off.
  2. Apart from this, if required the power button can be disabled from inside the CMOS.
  3. There is also Trusted Platform Module security which is a technology that can assist in creation of encrypted keys for accessing the system and this technology easily integrates with BitLocker from Microsoft.

A Look at the Chassis

The chassis is not cramped up inside and it is a tool less access set up. Inside the chassis it is quite roomy and you can easily replace parts if required. Another nice thing on this Dell PowerEdge is that on side panel you will find all the details about the internal components. The removal and installation of hard drives has been kept simple with 4 drive bays and the chassis includes 4 PCIe slots for expansion plus there are 2 USB ports available on motherboard.

Main Features of PowerEdge T110 II

United System Configurator to configure pre operating system environment.

  1. Management interfaces for setting up RAID arrays and remote access.
  2. OpenManage Server Administrator interface to get detailed statistics about system health, memory and CMOS. In addition to it, the administrators are allowed to view RAID controller properties and set up virtual disks.

How it performs?

It is surprisingly quiet and you will hardly hear any sound when it boots up. This is especially good for small businesses which may not be having a separate sever room and may keep the server over or under the desk within the office workspace itself. The server performs well not only with small business operating system such as Windows Small Business Server but equally well with full fledged ones such as Server 2008 R2.

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