Dell PowerEdge R430 review

Dell’s PowerEdge R430 offers an impressive compute power for space-constrained racks

Reviews
By Dave Mitchell
published

Deployment and power

Dell's embedded LifeCycle Controller makes light work of OS deployment as we used it to install Windows Server 2012 R2 with all the right drivers inside 30 minutes. It provides firmware upgrades tools, hardware diagnostics and facilities for configuring remote access and storage.

Dell's iDRAC8 provides a wealth of remote management features. Along with power controls, we could monitor graphs of power consumption and temperatures but if you want full remote control, you'll must upgrade to the Enterprise version - we've included this in the price shown.

The server was supplied with dual 1.6GHz E5-2603 Xeons and redundant 550W Platinum PSUs which proved to be easy on the power supply. With the OS in idle we measured a draw of 85W which peaked at only 132W with the CPUs under extreme load from the SiSoft Sandra benchmarking app.

Dell's OMM iOS app allowed us to keep a close eye on the server from our iPad

Dave Mitchell
Dave Mitchell

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.