Dell EMC PowerEdge R540
It’s pricey, but the R540 is a very powerful package with plenty of upgrade potential and a class management act
SCORE PRICE As reviewed (Smart Value Flexi), £5,489 exc VAT from dell.co.uk
Dell EMC’s PowerEdge R540 aims to strike the right balance of value and performance for growing businesses. To that end, this dual-CPU server targets a wide range of apps, including messaging, video surveillance, software-defined storage and data backup. To ensure it can handle those last two tasks with ease, it also comes with support for the latest 12TB hard disks.
The price listed above may not seem like much of a value proposition, but then the specification we tested includes a tasty pair of 16-core Xeon Gold 6130 CPUs. For many businesses that’s overkill, and you can save a lot of money by choosing a more modest processor specification. Be warned though: if you want to move upwards, your options are limited, as thermal limitations restrict you to CPUs with a TDP of 125W or less.
The R540 comes with either eight or 12 LFF front drive bays, and a wide range of storage options. If you need even more drives, you can add a two-bay carrier that slots in at the back. This is also designed for LFF drives, though: you can configure it with SFF drives and SSDs, but they’ll need an adapter to fit into the carrier.
Base configurations start with an embedded Dell PERC S140 SATA chip, supporting striped, mirrored or RAID5 arrays. But the motherboard also features a central riser for a dedicated RAID card, and our system included the H740P SAS3 controller; this adds RAID6 to the mix and comes with 4GB of battery protected cache memory (8GB will be enabled with a future firmware release). All the front drive bays are cabled to this via a single hot-swap backplane; the rear drive cage is also cabled to the backplane, so it can be serviced by the same RAID card, but installing it means you’re left with only one accessible PCI Express slot.
The good news is, you won’t need that slot for a networking upgrade, as the server supports LOM (LAN on motherboard) cards; these fit into a proprietary slot at the back and enable either dual Gigabit Ethernet, 10GbE copper or SFP+.
This in turn means that the spare PCI-E slot can optionally be used for a boot-optimised storage solution (BOSS) card – effectively a pair of M.2 SSDs that store your operating system, leaving all the standard bays free. It costs £499, including a mirrored set of 240GB drives.
Behind the backplane sit six cooling fans, but these are only of the cold-swap variety. Indeed, they’re tricky to remove from the R540’s busy interior, as their power connectors are obscured by the mounting bracket for the RAID controller.
The server’s memory arrangement is unusual, too: the first CPU gets ten
“The Quick Sync 2 module allows you to stand next to the server with an iPad and access system information over Bluetooth”
DIMM slots, while the other six come to life when a second processor is installed. You can use either RDIMM or LRDIMM memory, up to a maximum of 512GB in a dual-CPU configuration.
One high point of Dell EMC’s offering is its remote management features. The new iDRAC9 has a smart HTML5-based web interface which exposes a wealth of operational information. Inventory, power consumption, CPU performance graphs – it’s all there. Data centre support staff will also love the Quick Sync 2 module, located in the server’s left rackmount ear, which allows you to stand next to the server with an iPad and access system information over Bluetooth. The iOS app presents detailed views of server hardware, and comes with convenient options for remote control and reboot. And there’s even better to come: Dell EMC’s OpenManage Enterprise isn’t out yet, but we’ve tried an early preview and found it impressively slick and feature-packed.
The R540’s internal design is a bit quirky and cluttered, but it has all the features you could ask for – including the potential for plenty of compute power, and a huge bank of storage.
SPECIFICATIONS 2U rack chassis 2 x 2.1GHz Xeon Gold 6130 32GB 2,667MHz DDR4 (max 512GB) Intel C622 Dell PERC H740P SAS3/4GB NVRAM cache/BBU supports RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 50, 6, 60 2 x 2TB Dell SATA LFF hot-swap drives (max 14) 3 x PCI-E 3.0 (max 6) 2 x Gigabit Ethernet 1 x 1100W Platinum PSU (max 2) Dell iDRAC9 Enterprise 3yr on-site NBD warranty Power: 125W idle, 360W peak