Dell PowerEdge M420 Blade Server

Description

The PowerEdge M420 delivers exceptional density with consistent reliable performance. Dell's easy to use management tools enhance the reliability of this blade server and enable administrators to easily manage the system individually or collectively. The M1000e can accommodate up to 32 quarter-height server nodes in a 10U space to deliver tremendous processing power, memory capacity, and I/O throughput. Power, cooling, and networking are handled at the enclosure level.

Performance

The Dell M420 is an ultra-dense quarter-height server blade featuring Intel's C600 chipset to support a maximum of two next generation Xeon processors. Administrators can specify either the E5-2400 or E5-2400 v2 product families with up to 10-cores per processor.

Memory

There are six DIMM slots that support a maximum of 192GB of memory using 32GB DDR3 memory modules. Transfer speeds of up to 1600MT/s are supported depending on your choice of processor and memory. The M420 blade server can be loaded with unbuffered DIMM (UDIMM) and registered DIMM (RDIMM) modules, but they cannot be mixed. With UDIMM modules, the system will only support up to 24GB of memory. Flexible memory configurations are also supported.

Storage

Each M420 blade server supports a maximum of two uSATA 1.8-inch SSD drives. There is also an embedded PERC H310 RAID controller. For more storage, look to Dell's line of direct attached storage (DAS), network attached storage (NAS), internal SCSI (iSCUSI) or Fiber channel (FC). There is also a new DAS storage module for the M1000e enclosure, the EqualLogic PS-M4110, which can be used in conjunction with supported network switches and blade servers for a converged network solution.

Expansion

A single PCIe 3.0 x8 slot supports a mezzanine card with two redundant I/O fabrics. The M420 server blade features an embedded dual-port 10Gb LOM (LAN on Motherboard). There are also several options for network connectivity, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand Connections.

Management

Dell enables the blades to be managed in physical, virtual, local, and remote environments using iDRAC7 (integrated Dell remote Access Controller) with LifeCycle Controller for this particular module. To connect to third party management solutions, Dell's OpenManage allows Administrators to maintain a single point of contact over the network environment by easily integrating with existing management solutions. The Chassis Management Controller (CMC) located on the M1000e chassis, gives Administrators the ability to manage up to nine M1000e chassis, and up to 288 servers, through a single, embedded agent-less interface—from anywhere in the world.

iDRAC is installed in each of the blades and on the integrated I/O modules. CMC also provides a single point of connection from the management network to iDRAC, once again simplifying the complexities of managing the network.

Summary

The PowerEdge M420 server blade is a very capable and densely packed quarter-height node that is ideal for datacenters, high-node count virtualization, and high-performance computing. Each blade is individually serviceable and offers dual hot-pluggable, solid-state-drives to maximize reliability.