Dell PowerEdge C6220 review

Remote management

Remote management features are basic as the C6220 doesn't support Dell's iDRAC7 controllers. The nodes have an embedded IMPI controller which links up with the dedicated Fast Ethernet port at the rear.

Its web interface provides a simple set of management and monitoring tools. You can view temperatures, voltages plus fan speeds and link these values with thresholds. Alerts can be issued if they are exceeded or you can set the node to be automatically powered down or rebooted.

No power usage monitoring tools are provided but you can remotely switch the node on and off, reset it or gracefully power it down. Whereas the iDRAC7 requires an upgrade to get KVM-over-IP remote control and virtual media services, the C6220 provides these as standard.

Overall

The C6220 doesn't save you much cash over a quartet of standard 1U rack servers as we rustled up four 1U PowerEdge C620s from Dell's web site with the same specification for a similar price. Build quality and features of the C6220 aren't as good either so it doesn't meet the objective it sets out to achieve.

Verdict

The C6220 offers a high density rack with plenty of E5-2600 Xeon muscle under the covers. It comes with impressive power to processing ratio, but is not much cheaper than a set of standard 1U rack servers. Remote management features and build quality are also basic, which makes it hard to recommend.

Chassis: 2U rack Power: 2 x 1200W hot-plug supplies Storage: 12 x hot-swap LFF SATA II drive bays Four hot-swap nodes each with the following: CPU: 2 x 2.6GHz Xeon E5-2670 Memory: 32GB 1600MHz DDR3 RDIMM expandable to 256GB Storage: 1 x 500GB Dell SATA II hard disk in hot-swap carrier (max 3 per node) Storage controller: Intel C600 RAID: RAID0, 1, 10, 5 Expansion: 1 x PCI-e Gen 3 slot, mezzanine slot Network: 2 x Gigabit, dedicated 10/100 IPMI port Management: Embedded Dell IPMI controller Warranty: 3yrs on-site NBD