Dell’s flagship PowerEdge R920 is an affordable system for businesses running mid-range and enterprise mission critical apps such as HPC, ERP, e-commerce or big databases.
The quad-socket in the R920 supports Intel’s latest E7-4800/8800 v2 Xeons and offers a notable maximum density of 60 physical cores. Memory is spread across eight removable cartridges and once 64GB DIMMs become available (and affordable), the R920 can support up to 6TB.
It sports Dell’s new PERC H730p RAID card so support for 12Gbps SAS drives is also on the menu. One of the R920’s biggest competitors in this sector is HP’s ProLiant DL580 Gen8and the R920 offers a greater range of storage options.
Storage features
Externally, the R920 and its 4U chassis bears a resemblance to the R910 but Dell has boosted storage capacity from 16 to 24 SFF drives. These are arranged with two groups of six down each side of the front panel with another 16 bays mounted horizontally in between.
HP’s DL580 Gen8 has a different approach to local storage as it only has ten SFF drive bays. HP’s believes customers will offload server storage to a separate FC or IP SAN with larger servers.
The eight memory cartridges each have 12 DIMM slots and support a total of 6TB
Expansion and power
The R920 provides a total of ten PCI-e Gen3 slots so there’s plenty of room to expand. Two slots to the left are dedicated to the PERC H730p RAID card and network daughtercard but it’s possible to increase the slot count further by fitting risers in slots 1 and 9
Conclusion
The PowerEdge R920 is a superb rack server, which crams multiple features into its 4U chassis. It teams a high CPU count with a mammoth memory capacity, offers a liberal helping of RAS features and scores over the competition for its high storage capacity.