Dell PowerEdge R720
Dell’s 12th generation two-socket, 2U Xeon server—the PowerEdge R720—outperformed last year’s CRN Product of the Year in the server category by a substantial margin.
The R720 is built around Xeon E5-2600 series processors, the Sandy Bridge edition of Intel’s sturdy server platform. The tested unit was equipped with two eight-core E5-2680 processors running at 2.7GHz. Expandable up to 768 GB in 24 DIMM slots, the tested unit arrived at the CRN Test Center with Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise SP1 running on 128 GB of DDR3 1,600MHz SDRAM. The PowerEdge R720 turned in the fastest Geekbench score we’d seen in the CRN Test Center up to that time.