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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Power and noise

Power choices have been improved as well. Along with the dual 750W Platinum PSUs in the review system, Lenovo offers 550W and 1100W versions plus a 750W Titanium model and all share a common form factor.

Very low noise levels makes the TD350 well suited to a wide range of business environments and it's easy on the power, too. In idle, we measured the review system drawing a modest 124W which peaked at only 246W under heavy load from the SiSoft Sandra benchmarking app.

It may not seem much but we were very pleased to see the VGA port on the server's rear panel. Lenovo's RD550 rack server only has a DisplayPort interface which caused a lot of problems for us with local server management as the recommended DisplayPort-to-VGA converter failed to work on a wide range of monitors.

Lenovo's Energy Manager utility is of very limited value where the TD350 is in a single server environment. Based on Intel's Energy Director, it can display power and thermal readings for the TD350 but is primarily aimed at data centres where it monitors racks of servers and provides overviews of total power consumption.

The Energy Manager utility is better suited to data centre power monitoring

Conclusion

Lenovo's ThinkServer TD350 isn't as classy as Dell's mighty PowerEdge T630 (web ID:23069) but it matches it for sheer storage capacity and it's better value as well. Along with extensive upgrade options, it offers a range of innovative new features and the system on review delivers a powerful hardware package for the price.

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

Chassis: Tower CPU: 2 x 2.6GHz Intel Xeon E5-2630 v3 Memory: 64GB 2,133MHz DDR4 (max 512GB) Storage: 5 x 300GB Seagate SAS SFF (max 32) RAID: Lenovo AnyRAID 720ix 12Gbps SAS/1GB cache/BBU Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 6, 50, 60 Expansion: 7 x PCI-E 3 (with 2 CPUs) Network: 2 x Gigabit Power: 2 x 750W hot-plug PSUs Management: Lenovo TSM with Gigabit port Warranty: 3yrs on site NBD

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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