September 8, 2004
Dell’s choice of storage interface, impressive expansion options and fully featured management tools are rarely seen at this price point – a boon for the small business.
Now that Serial ATA (SATA) is fast becoming the storage interface of choice at the SMB level, Dell is embracing this technology with a vengeance. Targeting small businesses and remote branches or offices, the latest PowerEdge 700 brings plenty of SATA storage into play, but adds some impressive expansion options.
Management tools are also good – you don’t normally expect to see such sophistication at this level. For the latter, Dell bundles its complete OpenManage software suite, which is made up from its Server Administrator, IT Assistant and Array Manager utilities. Installation is simple enough – you can choose to install the components for a server that is to be managed, or those that will turn a system into a management server. Local management is handled by the browser-based Server Administrator, which offers plenty of tools for monitoring the myriad motherboard sensors. You can keep an eye on processors, memory and hard disks, and modify the server’s BIOS or download new firmware. For power, temperatures, voltages and fan speeds, each value is shown as a vertical bar graph. Setting individual thresholds enables these to be used with an alerting system, so warnings can be linked to network broadcasts, running an application and sending emails.
The IT Assistant is aimed at Dell-centric networks, as it’s designed to remotely monitor and manage all manner of Dell systems that have the relevant agent software installed. It scans the network and builds a list of discovered systems. You can run basic inventories on selected systems, shut them down, wake up WoL (Wake on LAN) compliant systems and ?ash their BIOS. It offers many features found in Server Administrator. You can remotely monitor critical components and link problems with alerts. Dell also included its latest DRAC III/XT remote management card in the review system, which enables the system to be accessed and controlled over the network or via a modem connected to its serial port irrespective of its condition.
Performance isn’t great, but we were able to connect to the server over a secure browser session, view the card’s properties and monitor vital statistics. All information provided by the local utility is available here and you can select up to eight sensors and view them all in real time from the same window. Power controls are particularly good as you can take full remote control and reboot the server, recycle power, shut it down or power it up.
Physically, the 700 is very well-built, and removing the side panel reveals a tidy interior with plenty of access to key components. A single 2.8GHz Pentium 4 processor sits near the top of the Dell motherboard, and is surmounted by one of the tallest passive heatsinks we’ve yet seen.
The price includes a decent 1GB of fast PC3200 memory, and the resident Intel E7210 chipset supports up to 4GB. As with HP’s ProLiant ML110 we found noise levels low enough to enable this system to sit unobtrusively on the desktop. Storage is well catered for with a pair of 80GB Seagate SATA drives, and the hard disk cage has room for two more. The motherboard offers a pair of embedded SATA interfaces, but RAID is on the menu in the shape of Dell’s CERC six-channel PCI controller card. The two drives came configured as a RAID-1 mirrored array. A nice touch is the extra SATA, and power cables are already installed ready to receive the two extra drives. Even the RAID controller gets its own management utility, which runs as an MMC (Microsoft Management Console) snap-in. From the Array Manager’s tidy interface you can view the controller, and physical and logical drives, check on free space and use the Windows Disk Administrator. Alerting is limited to the NT Event Log, but you can tie storage related errors and events into the Server Administrator.
Although the extra RAID and remote management options put the asking price into four figures, the 700 does represent good value. If you’re not worried about server management, products such as the lower cost but well-built ProLiant ML110 from HP will suffice. But if you want the bene?ts of SATA plus good storage fault tolerance, room to expand and, of course, full remote management, then the PowerEdge 700 is a worthy candidate.
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