Review: Dell PowerEdge R730

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Intel's power-sipping Haswell-EP processors are at the heart of Dell's 13th-gen servers, released in early September. In this video review, CRN Test Center Managing Editor Eddie Correia takes a look at thePowerEdge R730, Dell's latest microserver for small companies and departments. When compared with the R720 that it replaces, the R730 offers vastly improved speed and expandability, more configurations, and far easier manageability. Like the 720, the 730 accepts as much as 768 GB of RAM in 24 DIMM slots, but new memory controllers support DDR4 memory at speeds up to 3,200MHz once they start making it. Until then, 2,133MHz will have to do.

The tested system was equipped with two 12-core processors running at 2.6GHz and 64 GB of high-speed DDR4 RAM. For storage, there were five 300-GB 10K SAS drives connected to a PERC embedded RAID controller. Three of the drives were configured in a RAID 0 array, against which the tester used IOmeter to gauge the server's throughput and transaction processing capabilities. The system under test was running Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter.

To read a full review of Dell's PowerEdge R730, visitCRN.com/reviews.

PUBLISHED DEC. 16, 2014