Specifications

5 PowerEdge R420 Technical Guide
1 System overview
Introduction
The Dell™ PowerEdge™ R420 is a two-socket, 1U rack-mount server offering powerful
performance and scalability in a dense 1U rack form factor. An excellent fit for compute-intense
applications and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, the R420’s low profile also makes
it highly attractive for departmental email, workgroup collaboration and file and print in space-
constrained departmental or remote sites of large businesses and public organizations.
Performance and reliability combined for confidence
The R420 features the extensive performance of the Intel
®
Xeon
®
processor E5-2400 or E5-2400 v2
product families. Powerful processors alone, however, are not enough to deliver balanced
performance. Compute power must be combined with sufficient memory and I/O bandwidth to
prevent performance bottlenecking. The R420 complements its processors with 12 DIMM slots and
two PCI Express
®
(PCIe) 3.0-enabled I/O slots, providing a substantial memory footprint and wide
I/O bandwidth to support both memory-intensive and data-intensive applications and databases.
These combined technology features are also key design requirements when supporting
consolidated and virtualized environments, a role the R420 fits well. To protect your virtualized
workloads, the R420 offers dual, redundant SD media making your hypervisors redundant and
failsafe. Other reliability and availability features include up to four 3.5-inch or eight 2.5-inch hot-
plug hard drives, both hardware and software RAID options and redundant, hot-plug power supplies.
Simplified systems management, without compromise
The Dell OpenManage™ systems management portfolio includes Integrated Dell Remote Access
Controller 7 (iDRAC7) with Lifecycle Controller. This embedded feature helps IT administrators
manage Dell servers in physical, virtual, local and remote environments, operating in-band or out-
of-band, with or without a systems management software agent installed.
OpenManage iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller integrates and connects to leading third-party
systems management solutions (such as those from Microsoft, VMware and BMC Software), so users
can maintain a single point of control and capitalize on an existing systems management investment.
OpenManage simplifies the lifecycle of deploying, updating, monitoring and maintaining Dell
PowerEdge servers.