Dell EMC PowerEdge R340
A versatile server with good upgrade potential, plenty of storage choices and superb management features
SCORE PRICE As reviewed (Smart Value Flexi), £1,579 exc VAT from dell.co.uk
Dell EMC offers two 1U servers based on Intel’s current Xeon E processor family. The entrylevel PowerEdge R240 targets small businesses looking for their first server, while the R340 on review is intended as a more scalable option.
One notable difference is the storage choices: the R240 is only available with four LFF drive bays, while with the R340 you get a choice of four LFF or eight SFF hot-swap bays.
We tested the four-bay model, which came supplied with two 1TB SATA LFF drives. These are handled by the embedded PERC S140 SATA RAID controller, and that’s fine to start with, but the system also includes a PERC H330 PCIe RAID card, so you can move up to 12Gbits/sec SAS drives when the time comes.
Another bit of storage resides on Dell EMC’s Boot Optimised Storage Solution (BOSS) PCIe card; this hosts
dual mirrored M.2 SATA SSDs for your OS, freeing up your drive bays for storage. The 240GB version costs £305, and it’s partnered with an Internal Dual SD Module (IDSDM) for running embedded hypervisors, which has its own motherboard slot.
The system as tested comes with a single 350W hotplug power supply, but it’s easy to build in redundancy here, too: a spare PSU bay at the rear sits ready to take either another 350W unit or a high-power 550W Platinum PSU if required. At the heart of the whole show is a quad-core Intel Xeon E-2134 CPU, running at 3.5GHz. It’s partnered with 32GB of DDR4 supplied as two 16GB modules, so you can fit another two to achieve the maximum 64GB of RAM. Dell EMC has yet to announce whether we can expect a BIOS update to raise the memory limit to 128GB.
PCIe expansion, meanwhile, isn’t in question. The PERC H330 drive controller is installed in a dedicated PCIe slot on the motherboard, leaving two slots in the riser card free for upgrades. One obvious use for these is to add more and faster network connections – the server has two
“The system includes a PERC H330 PCIe RAID card, so you can move to 12Gbits/sec SAS drives when the time comes”
embedded Gigabit Ethernet ports, but Dell EMC offers a wide range of 10-Gigabit Ethernet expansion cards.
Aside from expandability, one of the best things about the PowerEdge R340 is Dell EMC’s iDRAC9 management platform. Its HTML5 web interface delivers a wealth of information on server operations, with the dashboard screen providing a quick view of system and storage health. We were also able to manage the server from our iPad, using Dell EMC’s OpenManage Mobile (OMM) iOS app, although the R340 doesn’t support the Quick Sync 2 Bluetooth module for walk-up access.
A third way in is via Dell EMC’s OpenManage Enterprise 3.1 software, which we ran in a Hyper-V VM. On discovering the R340, this presented plenty of details on general operations, along with fault-alerting services, access to the server’s virtual console and remote power controls.
Included in the price above is the iDRAC9 Enterprise upgrade, which enables full OS remote control and virtual media services. The latter made it a breeze to map a remote Windows Server 2019 ISO to the server, enabling us to get the OS installed in 30 minutes.
In use, the R340 is a pretty quiet customer, with the SPLnFFT app on our iPad recording sound levels of 44.2dB from one metre in front. CPU and memory cooling is handled by three cold-swap fans, with a fourth in front of the expansion slots.
There are lots of reasons to like the PowerEdge R340. It offers a great specification at a good price, with the expansion potential to handle growing demands. For many, though, the main attraction will be Dell EMC’s remote management features, which are simply the best on the planet.
SPECIFICATIONS 1U rack chassis 3.5GHz quad-core Xeon E-2134 32GB 2,667MHz DDR4 ECC (max 64GB) Intel C246 Dell PERC H330 supports RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 50 2 x 1TB SATA LFF hard disks (max 4 LFF/8 SFF)
3 x PCIe 3 2 x Gigabit Ethernet 350W hotplug PSU (max 2) Dell iDRAC9 Enterprise with Gigabit Ethernet 3yr on-site NBD warranty power consumption: 29W idle, 76W peak