Dell PowerEdge R230 Review
The new 13th Gen PowerEdge R230 is powered by the Intel Skylake family of processors that offers a variety of features including several versions focused on compute-intensive workloads that will be a real boost to our Magento Hosting customers.
Our first R230 came with an Intel E3-1280 v5 processor that runs at 3.70 GHz (turbo 4Ghz), 32GB of DDR4 memory, two 480Gb Enterprise SSD’s attached to a PERC H330 adapter and a total of three 1 GB Ethernet ports, including the management port. The game changer for us at Simple Servers is the addition of hot swap drives, not seen before in the forerunners of the 230 in the 200 series.
We are confident that this new architecture will deliver speed increases for our magento hosting customers over and above the current R220, that was based on the Haswell Bridge architecture. The R230 is based on Skylake the codename for the Intel processor microarchitecture that is the successor to the Haswell Bridge microarchitecture.
A single LGA1151 CPU socket holds a processor from the Intel E3-1200 v5 four-core Skylake family. Four memory slots make it possible to use 16GB DDR4 devices, for up to a maximum of 64GB of memory double on what the R220 had at 32GB.
Two PCIe 3.0 slots double the I/O throughput of the previous PCIe 2.0 standard. This makes a big difference with disks connected to the R230/PERC9 controller. The PowerEdge R230 supports a wide range of rotating and solid state disk devices of the 2.5- and 3.5-inch variety.
Two USB 2.0 ports and a VGA connector on the front panel allow you to connect a keyboard, mouse and monitor, if necessary. The rear panel has two USB 3.0 ports and three RJ-45 Ethernet ports, plus a serial and VGA for management. Another internal USB 3.0 port can be used for boot media in a VMware environment. A single 250W power supply delivers more than enough power for all the components you can stuff into a 1U device.
Dell’s latest iDRAC8 delivers a number of new features plus recognition of the latest hardware. New capabilities include support for the Data Center Manageability Interface (DCMI) 1.5 standard, new performance monitoring screens and the ability to do a system wipe.