The Dell Poweredge R720 and the R720DX are two of the most popular rackmount servers that you can find refurbished on many tech providers' sites at the moment.
Additionally, even though it has been a while since their release as individual products, they are still high up on the list for rackmount servers that are most popular among server purchases.
However, newbies to the server game will probably find themselves scratching their heads and wondering what the difference is between these two very similar products available from Dell.
In fairness, these two products will seem like there's very little difference between them to an untrained eye, but as this article will show, there's much more than meets the eye with these rackmount servers.
To make it a little clearer, let's have a closer look at each of the two products and compare the differences between their specifications. Alternatively, to view each product for yourself, you can click here for more information.
What is the Dell Poweredge R720?
The Dell Poweredge R720 is a 2-unit rackmount server as part of Dell's 12th generation of server-based products. It has the capacity for a large scale database, good capacities for data warehousing and great virtualisation application.
This allows the server to function for a variety of applications and as long as it is configured correctly, can bring a great deal of efficiency to a previously slower system.
The R720 can be bought in variations of processing speeds, ranging from 2.0 GHz up to a maximum of 3.8 GHz and similarly, the core processing power can be upgraded from a base of two quad-cores all the way up to two twelve-core Intel processors.
What is the Dell Poweredge R720DX?
On the other hand, the Dell Poweredge R720DX is an ultra-dense version of the R720 that is more geared towards handling projects engaging with big data and is also accompanied by the capacity of the enormous 768GB of DDR3 memory, owing to its 24 DIMM slots.
Maintenance for this server is very easy and reliability is high with its reviewed performance. With custom configuration of network ports available, you can be sure that you're wasting very little I/O space when configuring the R720DX.
What are the differences between the two?
Off the bat, it is clear that both of these models are good 2U rackmount servers. The XD version weighs in at just two to three pounds more than the standard model due to the increase in hard drive bays that the XD model has.
Additionally, the extra bays that the XD model has come with the option for more than one type of configuration and can hold nearly double the number of hard drives than the regular R720 can.
The XD model also receives more frequent BIOS update revision due to the modern release of the model. The processing power of both of the models remains quite similar, with no major changes seen upcoming in any plans from Dell.
They are both capable of running Intel Xeon processors and they both offer twenty-four DDR3 slots for RDIMMs, LRDIMMs and UDIMMs as well.
