Dell PowerEdge R720 Technical Guide - Page 25

The Dell™ PowerEdge™ R720 and R720xd provide storage expandability that allows you to adapt to your workload and operational demands. With comprehensive storage options, the R720 and R720xd offer various drive types, internal and external storage controllers, and different chassis and backplanes for varied numbers of drives. Due to their massive internal storage capacities, the R720 and R720xd are optimized for a variety of implementations, including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments and collaboration solutions. The R720 supports up to 16 and the R720xd supports up to 26 internal 2.5-inch drives. Features such as Express Flash PCIe solid-state drives (available Q2 2012) and CacheCade™ provide vastly accelerated performance over previous technologies. Dell Express Flash drives use PCIe lanes to connect directly to the processor and chipset and are easily accessible by hot-plug drive bay. CacheCade uses Dell PERC storage controllers to accelerate performance over hard drives or traditional solid-state drives. The R720 and R720xd are available in several hot-plug, hard-drive chassis options, as detailed in Table 11. Note that the chassis option must be selected at the point of purchase and cannot be changed or upgraded later. PowerEdge server Chassis option 16 x 2.5" drives 8 x 2.5" + 8 x 2.5" drives (with dual RAID controllers) 8 x 2.5" drives 8 x 2.5" + 4 x Express Flash1 drives 8 x 3.5" drives 24 x 2.5" drives (front) + 2 x 2.5" drives (back)2 12 x 3.5" drives (front) + 2 x 2.5" drives (back) 2 1Available Q2 2012 2Back-accessible 2.5" drives are optional 25 PowerEdge R720 and R720xd Technical Guide