The Dell PowerEdge R730xd is a two-socket 2U rack server designed around flexibility in local storage as much as raw compute. It ships with support for the Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processor family, with core counts running from 4 up to 18 per socket and 2.5MB of cache per core, giving a wide spread of performance and power-draw options depending on which pair of CPUs you configure.
Memory is handled across 24 DDR4 DIMM slots, scaling to 768GB using a mix of 4GB, 8GB, 16GB and 32GB modules running at up to 2133MT/s. That density, combined with six PCIe 3.0 expansion slots and a dedicated RAID card slot, gives the R730xd enough I/O and memory headroom to run as a serious virtualisation host or as a database platform with room to grow.
Storage is where this model earns its reputation. Dell offered six distinct drive-bay configurations on the R730xd, from a low-cost 16 x 3.5" SAS/SATA layout offering up to roughly 100TB of raw capacity, through to a 26 x 2.5" hybrid configuration mixing SAS, SATA, SSD and PCIe SSD drives. Dual-PERC support (PERC H330, H730 or H730P internally, H830 externally) lets you split storage across two independent controllers, and up to four Express Flash NVMe PCIe SSDs can be added for tiered caching or latency-critical workloads. That range of storage options is why the R730xd turns up equally often as a Microsoft Exchange or SharePoint server, a Hadoop or big-data node, and a high-IOPS database server.
iDRAC8 with Lifecycle Controller is built in as standard, giving agent-free remote management, health monitoring and firmware update capability regardless of which operating system is installed. The R730xd carries broad OS support across Windows Server 2008 R2 through 2012 R2, SUSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and VMware ESX/ESXi, along with optional embedded hypervisor support for Citrix XenServer.
As a refurbished purchase, the R730xd specifically benefits from being a mature, well-documented platform: parts availability is good, firmware and driver support from Dell is comprehensive, and its hot-plug drives, redundant power supplies and redundant cooling mean a used unit that's been properly tested still has plenty of service life left. Because storage and memory configuration varies so widely across the six chassis layouts Dell offered, buying configured to order means you get the drive bays, controller and memory density that actually fit your workload rather than paying for capacity you won't use.
Each server we supply comes with a 3 year warranty, and is configured to order rather than sold as a fixed bundle, so the processor pairing, RAM, RAID controller and drive layout are all selected to match your intended deployment.
