Reviews

Fujitsu Primergy RX600 S6 review

Fujitsu’s new Primergy RX600 S6 is a highly scalable enterprise server designed for running critical applications and virtualisation. In this exclusive review, Dave Mitchell takes a closer look at this mighty Xeon E7 system and its 40 processor cores.

1 Feb 2012

Price

£15,215

Fujitsu's Primergy RX600 S6 server targets mid-sized businesses and enterprises looking for a reliable platform to run business critical software and to use virtualisation as a means of server consolidation.

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Sheer processing power and memory capacity are key requirements for these kinds of usage scenarios and this server is something of a showcase for Intel's latest Xeon E7 processors. Our review system came with a four 10-core Xeon E7-4850 CPUs, each equipped with Intel's Hyper-Threading technology for an impressive 80 logical cores, all housed in a compact 4U chassis.

Memory can be spread across a maximum of eight boards behind the front panel and each has eight DIMM sockets, for 64 DIMMs in total. Although the Xeon E7 chipset supports up to 2TB, memory capacity is currently limited to 1TB until Fujitsu offers 32GB DIMM modules.

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Intel's RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) technology provides plenty of memory protection options. The RX600 S6 supports a wide range of memory mirroring and sparing features, and its memory boards are now hot-swappable.

If a memory fault occurs, warning LEDs illuminate on the front and rear of the server, as well as on the relevant memory board. Pressing a button on the board's status display will then safely power it down, allowing it to be removed and the faulty module replaced, without incurring any system downtime.

The RX600 S6's internal layout is very tidy, and Fujitsu's tool-free design makes light work of maintenance and upgrade manoeuvres. All chassis cooling is handled by a bank of eight hot-swap fans at the front and we found the server to be surprisingly quiet during testing.