Dell EMC PowerEdge T340
A superb single-socket tower server for SMBs, with excellent management and plenty of room to grow
SCORE
PRICE As reviewed, £2,893 ex VAT from dell.co.uk
Dell EMC’s PowerEdge T340 is ideal for anyone seeking an expandable tower server without the expense of dual CPU sockets. Don’t call it a compromise candidate, however: with support for Intel’s E-2200 CPUs and plenty of storage capacity, it has all the power most SMBs are likely to need.
Pricing starts at a terrifically affordable £1,050, which includes a quad-core 3.4GHz Xeon E-2224 CPU. Our test system came with a top-ofthe-range eight-core 3.7GHz Xeon E-2288G, but there are plenty of cheaper alternatives, especially if you don’t need the embedded GPU.
Build quality is excellent. The T340 has exactly the same burly chassis construction as the enterprise-class T640, with solid pressed steel panels all round, a lockable side panel and Dell EMC’s trademark metal honeycombed front bezel.
Behind that front cover, you’ll find an eight-bay hot-swap drive cage supporting LFF hard disks and SSDs mounted in spacer brackets (there’s no SFF option). The price includes two 2TB SATA hard disks, but Dell EMC also offers a wide range of highercapacity models, SSDs, Nearline SAS and SAS drives. These are relatively expensive, but they’re included in the warranty and come supplied with the appropriate carrier. If you prefer, you can use your own drives, but you’ll have to source the carriers yourself.
Remove the side panel and you’ll find the lower half of the interior largely taken up by a plastic shroud, which drives the air from a 12cm rear fan directly through the CPU’s passive heatsink and drive cage. As well as providing cooling where it’s needed, this keeps noise levels low, making the T340 a great choice for small offices that value tranquillity.
One slight surprise is the size of the motherboard, which appears quite diminutive compared to the chassis. However, this means there’s plenty of room on all sides, providing easy access for maintenance and upgrades. Our system included a full house of four 16GB ECC DDR4 modules, but if you choose a lower provision you can easily get to the DIMM slots beneath the CPU socket to add more as needed.
Access to the PCIe sockets is just as convenient. The embedded PERC S140 controller supports softwaremanaged mirrors, stripes and RAID5 arrays for SATA drives, but we opted
“The T340 has the same burly chassis construction as the enterprise-class T640, with solid pressed steel panels all round”
to add a PERC H730P PCIe RAID adapter, which brings SAS into play, adds RAID6 and 60 support and comes with 1GB of batteryprotected onboard cache.
Other optional storage features include Dell’s Internal Dual SD Module (IDSDM), which plugs into a slot on the motherboard and provides redundant storage for running a hypervisor. For good measure, we also added Dell’s PCIe Boot Optimized Storage Solution (BOSS) card, which provides dual mirrored 240GB M.2 SSDs to house your operating system, allowing you to dedicate all the front drive bays for storage.
Any other requirements you may have can be accommodated because, even with the BOSS in residence, you have three more slots to play with.
For example, if the twin embedded Gigabit Ethernet ports aren’t enough for you, Dell EMC offers a wide range of 10GbE cards.
One last strength of the T340 is remote management. The server sports Dell EMC’s iDRAC9 controller, which in our view is simply the best around, with a web console that presents a wealth of information on server operations, and a dashboard screen providing a quick view of system and storage health. Upgrading to an Enterprise licence enables full OS remote control and virtual media services too. We used these features to mount a remote Windows Server 2019 ISO and install it on the BOSS card in 30 minutes, but if you prefer to do things the old-fashioned way you can install your OS from physical media using the integrated DVD-ROM drive.
Anyone seeking a powerful server – but not wanting the expense of a Xeon Scalable CPU – will find the PowerEdge T340 fits the bill perfectly. It delivers Xeon E-2200 processing at a fair price, with a great range of configuration options, plenty of room to grow and superb build quality, making it an ideal fit for office life.
SPECIFICATIONS
Tower chassis Intel Xeon 3.7GHz E-2288G CPU 64GB 2,667MHz DDR4 (max 64GB) 2 x 2TB Dell SATA hard disks (max 8) Dell PERC H730P RAID SAS/ SATA adapter supports RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 6, 50, 60 BOSS card with 2 x 240GB M.2 SSDs DVD-ROM drive 4 x PCIe 3 2 x Gigabit Ethernet 2 x 495W hotplug PSUs Dell iDRAC9 Enterprise 220 x 600 x 402mm (WDH) 3yr on-site basic NBD warranty