IT Pro Verdict

The CyberServe XE5-102S v3 delivers a mighty hardware spec in a tiny rack chassis making it ideal for hosting a wide range of business apps in the smallest of rack spaces

Reasons to buy

+
Innovative chassis design; Remarkable hardware/size ratio; Low cost 10GbE upgrades; Good value

Reasons to avoid

-
Small storage capacity

By Dave Mitchell

published 1 July 2015

in Reviews

Storage and expansion

Storage capacity is limited as the chassis only has room for a pair of SFF drives. The backplane is cabled directly one of the motherboard's dual embedded 4-port mini-SAS connectors and supports hot-swap SATA drives.

As the bays are located to the side of the chassis, they're outside the main cooling air flow so Asus only certifies SSDs for this system. Broadberry included two 240GB Intel S3500 SATA SSDs in the price preconfigured in a mirror.

There is another storage option as the motherboard has an onboard M.2 slot. This allows high-speed SATA MLC Flash cards to be installed and Broadberry can supply a 128GB Asus-certified card for a mere 60.

The CyberServe is ideal if your chosen app requires lots of network ports as it has a pair of PCI-Express slots both supporting full-height, half-length expansion cards. Alternatively, you can use the mezzanine slot below and Broadberry quoted us a low 180 ex VAT for a dual-port 10GBase-T card.

Broadberry also includes the ASWM Enterprise app for monitoring all your Asus servers

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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.