Specifications

5 PowerEdge T420 Technical Guide
1 System overview
Introduction
The two-socket Dell™ PowerEdge™ T420 tower server delivers balanced performance and
expandability for non-disruptive growth. Optional redundancy and hot pluggability of key
components helps to protect data and keep the business running. The T420 is an excellent fit for a
wide range of applications, including workgroup collaboration, email, file and print, and small- to
midsized database applications such as Business Analytics and Intelligence. In addition, the T420’s
performance and capacities make it highly attractive for consolidation and virtualization.
A versatile workhorse
Featuring the powerful performance of the Intel
®
Xeon
®
processor E5-2400 and E5-2400 v2
product families, and complemented by substantial memory capacity and broad I/O bandwidth, the
T420 provides high, balanced performance and built-in room for growth. Its 12 DIMM slots and six
PCI Express
®
(PCIe) slots provide memory density and wide I/O bandwidth to support both
memory- and data-intensive applications and databases. Built-in capacity for up to eight 3.5-inch or
16 2.5-inch hard drives accommodate data storage as your business or organization grows. These
combined technology features are highly beneficial when implementing consolidated and
virtualized environments, a role in which the T420 also shines.
To protect your virtualized workloads, the PowerEdge T420 offers dual SD media making your
hypervisors redundant and failsafe. Other reliability and availability features include hot-plug hard
drives, both hardware and software RAID options, redundant fans and 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.