Specifications

6 PowerEdge T420 Technical Guide
Key technologies
Table 1 summarizes key technologies used in the Dell PowerEdge T420 tower server.
Table 1. Key technologies
Key technology
Detailed description
Intel Xeon processor
E5-2400 and E5-2400 v2
product families
This Intel Xeon processor E5-2400 and E5-2400 v2 product families have
embedded PCIe lanes for improved I/O performance. See the Processor section
for details.
Intel C602 series chipset
The Intel Platform Controller Hub (PCH) chip is implemented on the T420 server.
1600MT/s DDR3 memory
Certain models of the Intel Xeon processor E5-2400 and E5-2400 v2 product
families support 1600MT/s memory. The T420 supports two DIMMs per channel at
1600MT/s with certain models. See the Memory section for details.
Next-generation PERC
options
The T420 supports the new PERC controller cards with improved functionality and
faster performance. See the Storage section for details.
PERC S110 software RAID
Solution
This new software RAID solution supports RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10, and supports a
maximum of four hot-plug SATA hard drives or SATA solid-state drives. See the
Storage section for details.
iDRAC7 with Lifecycle
Controller
The embedded system management solution for Dell servers features hardware
and firmware inventory and alerting, in-depth memory alerting, faster
performance, a dedicated gigabit port, and many more features. See the Dell
OpenManage systems management section for details.
Internal GPU support
The T420 supports internal graphics processing units (GPUs) for virtual desktop
infrastructure (VDI) and medical imaging. See the Processor section for details.
Advanced power
management
The T420 supports advanced power monitoring and power capping tools that can
help manage power consumption. See the Power, thermal, and acoustics section
for details.
Fresh Air cooling
Dell has tested and validated an integrated data center solution that enables you
to operate at higher temperatures or even chiller-less. See the Power, thermal, and
acoustics section for details.
Failsafe hypervisors
The internal dual SD module enables Dell's unique failsafe virtualization
architecture, ensuring uptime by providing failover capability for embedded
hypervisors such as VMware
®
vSphere
®
ESXi™. See the Supported virtualization
section for details.
Fan fault tolerance
Failure of one fan rotor is tolerated through increasing fan speeds. This feature
helps reduce downtime by allowing you to schedule a fan replacement within 360
hours of a fan failure.