Dell PowerEdge R520 Rack Server CTO

A powerful, 2-socket rack server, the Dell PowerEdge R520 delivers balanced performance and storage expandability for data-intensive applications.

The Dell PowerEdge R520 is a 2-socket, 2U rack-mount server offering an excellent balance of processing power, storage capacity, and redundancy. The R520’s price per performance, configuration flexibility, and headroom for growth make it highly appealing for consolidation and virtualization, web hosting, for use as a medium size mail server, or as a general-purpose server. The R520 is optimized for running a wide range of core applications, such as small-medium mail server, web server, small-scale hosting, and database server. Consistent worldwide support makes it highly appealing to larger businesses and organizations with distributed offices.

The extensive memory, storage, and I/O capacities of the R520 make it ideal for consolidation and virtualization. Delivering the performance of two Intel Xeon E5-2400 processors and complemented by up to twelve DIMMs, up to four PCIe 3.0-enabled slots and up to eight internal hard drives, the R520 delivers balanced performance. With built-in redundancy, the R520 is a trustworthy platform for your business-critical databases and applications. The dense form factor and innovative systems management of the R520 allow you to save space and to use your IT administrator’s time efficiently.

Features that protect your business data and keep the server running are essential. The extensive storage capacity of the R520 can be protected with both hardware RAID controllers and software solutions to protect your data and ensure that it is readily available. Built-in reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features such as hot-pluggable hard drives and power supplies minimize the need to disrupt production work to take a server offline in the event of a component failure. Redundant, failsafe hypervisors also add an additional layer of protection for virtualized environments.

Tackle your core business applications and virtualization requirements with the power and versatility of the PowerEdge R520. With the Intel Xeon processor E5-2400 and E5-2400 v2 product families and up to 12 DIMMs of memory, the R520 is designed to deliver the best combination of performance, built-in capabilities and optional features for your growing business.

Reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features help keep the system online and operational without significant impact to performance, and can decrease data loss and crashing due to errors. RAS aids in rapid, accurate diagnosis of faults that require service. Table 10 describes the RAS features supported on the R520

A tooled latch is integrated on the top cover with a coin key lock to secure the system.

An optional metal bezel is mounted to the chassis front to provide the Dell ID. A lock on the bezel is used to protect un-authorized access to hard drives. System status is viewable on the LCD screen when the bezel is installed.

The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is used to generate/store keys, protect/authenticate passwords, and create/store digital certificates. It also supports the Intel Xeon TXT functionality. TPM can also be used to enable the BitLocker™ hard drive encryption feature in Windows Server 2008. TPM 1.2 is supported. No TPM version is available for China or Russia.

BIOS has the ability to disable the power button function

An internal switch is used to detect chassis intrusion.

BIOS has the ability to enter a secure boot mode through system setup. This mode includes the option to lock out the power and NMI switches on the control panel or set up a system password.