I often joke that I am the CIO of my house where I have to plan out the strategy and troubleshoot all of the devices on my home network.

But for small businesses, management is no joke.

So many small businesses have nobody on staff to manage their systems; often their support and management comes from an outside company on a contract basis.  When you move up into the medium business world, it is more likely that there is someone on the staff to manage the servers and IT devices, however this does not mean that they have lots of time to sit around poking at consoles.  Medium businesses are part of that economic growth engine that is starting to fire up in 2011 and one can only assume that these IT folks are going to be pretty busy.

Two new servers that are helping make the SMB world more manageable are the Dell PowerEdge R415 and PowerEdge R515 servers. The R415 is a slim, 1U dual processor server and the R515 is the 2U dual processor platform.  Both utilize the AMD Opteron™ 4100 Series processors that help SMBs meet their business needs through a stunning combination of power efficiency and value.

But it is not all about us and our processors, Dell has included several key management features that make these servers just as manageable as their corporate counterparts, the PowerEdge R715 and R815 which are based on the 12-core AMD Opteron 6100 series processors.

Management features include:

• Dell OpenManage featuring Dell Management Console – Dell’s system management console and monitoring tools that help you keep an up to the minute status on the health of your PowerEdge server.
• BMC, IPMI 2.0 compliant – This integrated management controller allows you to access and manage your server remotely, via an Ethernet connect, performing management activities like monitoring and alerting, as well as allowing access to server logs to help troubleshoot when things aren’t going your way.
• Lifecycle Controller enabled via optional: iDRAC6 Express, or iDRAC6 Enterprise and Vflash – an embedded flash chip on the system board that provides persistent storage for all of the systems management components and OpenManage tools.
• Unified Server Configurator – A tool that allows for one-stop shopping when it comes to updating all of the BIOS, drivers, firmware and other components in the system. This single interface makes it easy to keep all of the components up to date at all times.

When you combine all of these management features along with the high availability options like Dell’s PERC RAID controllers, redundant power and hot-pluggable drives, you are looking at a great solution to help SMB customers not only keep their businesses online but also under control.  If your SMB is looking for a way to harness its growth and provide the scalability that you need for the future, these are great servers to check out.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD.  His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.