Lenovo ThinkServer TD350 review

Lenovo’s ThinkServer TD350 tower server delivers a radical redesign and a big hardware package for the price

IT Pro Verdict

Lenovo’s new ThinkServer TD350 is vastly superior to its predecessors as it’s far better built and designed. It teams up a big storage capacity with the versatile AnyRAID controllers, is much more manageable and it’s good value as well

Reasons to buy
  • +

    Very good value; Excellent design; Big storage capacity; Improved deployment and system management tools

Reasons to avoid
  • -

    Energy Manager utility has limited value

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Deployment and AnyRAID

OS deployment is now much easier as Lenovo's embedded ThinkServer Deployment Manager (TDM) does away with the need to boot the server with a setup disk. It provides tools for BIOS setup, platform updates plus direct access for storage configuration and its wizard helped us load Windows Server 2012 R2 in less than 30 minutes.

There's a lot more as the TD350 shows off a major hardware refresh. It's much more solidly built than Lenovo's previous towers and storage capacity gets a massive boost as it supports a maximum of 15 LFF or 32 SFF drives.

You can start with the embedded RAID 110i controller which supports mirrored and striped 6Gbps SATA drives and accepts a RAID5 upgrade key. Lenovo's AnyRAID feature is quite unique as it extends the TD350's PCI-Express bus to a mid-plane card fitted directly behind the drive bays.

The AnyRAID adapters snap in to the mid-plane card and Lenovo offers three options starting with the 510i. This supports eight 6Gbps SAS drives, mirrors and stripes and can also be upgraded to RAID5 and 50 arrays.

We had the high-end RAID 720ix adapter which supports 12Gbps SAS drives, RAID6 and 60 plus 1GB of read-only cache. Add the optional 4GB flash module and you can play with LSI's CacheVault, CacheCade and FastPath features for improved storage performance.

Lenovo's new TSM provides plenty of information about server operations

Dave Mitchell
Dave Mitchell

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.

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