Dell introduced the PowerEdge FX2 platform late in 2014 as its flagship entry into the converged infrastructure hardware market. With slots for up to four half-wide 1U server modules or two full-width modules, you could use the 2U FX2 enclosure to implement a heavy-duty virtualization cluster and/or software-defined storage solutions such as VMware Virtual SAN and Windows Server Storage Spaces. The PowerEdge FC830 FX server block is the latest addition to the FX2 family, packing four sockets of computing power and up to 1.5TB of memory into a full-width 1U module.

The FC830 module I received for review came with four Intel Xeon E5-4650 v3 processors and 192GB of memory. With a total of 48 memory slots, you could go up to 1.5TB using 32GB DIMMs. The FX2 chassis that houses the FC830 provides eight shared PCIe slots. Chassis network connectivity consists of two 10GB SFP modules, each with a total of eight ports. The FC830 came with four internal 10GB ports for a total bandwidth capacity of 40GB.