Dell EMC offers a remarkable range of PowerEdge rack servers for organisations of all sizes and its ‘xs’ family is designed to satisfy those with a narrower range of requirements and smaller budgets. The standard PowerEdge R650 is an impressive 1U rack server but businesses with small to mid-range workloads won’t want to pay extra for the privilege of having high-end options such as support for core-heavy Xeon Scalable Platinum CPUs, 4TB of memory, Intel PMEM 200 modules, triple GPU cards and water cooling.

The PowerEdge R650xs is a cost optimized version of the R650 and targets workloads such medium density virtualization, VDI, SDNs, database scale-out and HPC. Limiting the R650xs to 32-core Xeon Scalable Gold CPUs has extra cost benefits for VMware fans too, as it means they won’t have to step over the per-core licensing threshold.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R650xs review: Internal layout

At first glance, there’s little to differentiate the R650xs from its more powerful brother - although at 735mm deep, its chassis is shorter by around 75mm. You’ll find more differences under the lid, as the R650xs uses the same internal design as the previous generation of 1U rack server models.

To improve cooling for Platinum CPUs, the R650 uses a T-shaped motherboard so its PSUs can be positioned on each side of the chassis, whereas the R650xs keeps both PSUs in a single rear hot-plug bay on the left. Opt for a modest hardware specification and you can save even more cash by fitting low-cost 600W PSUs - which aren’t available for the R650.

All cooling is handled by a bank of fans arranged in front of the motherboard and the type will be determined by your choice of CPU. For modules up to a 165W TDP, you can specify standard fans, but as our system was supplied with a pair of 205W TDP 28-core Xeon Scalable Gold 6330 modules, it required a set of seven high-performance Gold fans.

The good news is there are no expansion restrictions, and the R650xs supports up to three PCI-E Gen 4 half-length, half-height cards – the same as the R650. There’s more, as underneath the central two-slot riser is an OCP 3 edge connector, and the price of our system includes a Broadcom dual-port 25GbE mezzanine card.

Dell EMC advised us that a lot of its customers don’t purchase more than 1TB of server memory so the number of DIMM slots has been halved to 16 to meet this upper limit. Our system was supplied with all its DIMM slots filled with 16GB DDR4 modules for a healthy total of 256GB.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R650xs review: Storage choices

General storage options are extensive; the R650xs can be ordered with four LFF, eight SFF or ten SFF front drive bays. While pricing up our system via Dell EMC’s online store, we found that if you choose a backplane that supports 10 front SAS/SATA bays or 10 NVMe SSDs, you can add a rear Flex Bay which provides room for two NVMe SSDs, although this does come at the cost of the central two-slot expansion riser.

RAID choices are extensive and start with the server’s embedded PERC S150 controller which provides software-managed RAID0, 1, 5 and 10 arrays for SATA devices. You can choose from a wide range of hardware RAID controllers and the price we’ve shown includes Dell EMC’s top-dog PERC H755 Front SAS card

Along with support for all popular RAID array types including RAID6 and 60, it sports 8GB of DDR4 cache memory and a battery backup unit (BBU). A feature which makes for a very tidy interior is the RAID card and BBU are neatly mounted in a dedicated space above the drive bays, plug directly into the backplane and connect to the motherboard with one cable.

The R650xs doesn’t support the latest BOSS (boot optimised storage solution) S2 card which presents dual M.2 SATA SSDs in removable carriers at the rear. Instead, it has a dedicated slot between its two expansion card risers where the older cold-swap BOSS S1 card nestles, and we’ve priced the system up with dual mirrored 480GB SSDs.

A cheaper alternative for running an embedded hypervisor is Dell EMC’s IDSDM (internal dual SD module). This fits into a dedicated slot on the motherboard, provides redundant storage and costs £253 for one with dual 64GB microSD cards.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R650xs review: Remote management

There are no compromises with remote management as the R650xs has the same Dell EMC iDRAC9 controller as its more well-endowed PowerEdge brethren. It presents a slick web console offering a wealth of information on system and component status, power usage and cooling efficiency along with a hardware inventory plus direct access to BIOS and storage configurations.

The optional Quick Sync 2 module is a great feature for support staff that want walk-up diagnostics on their mobile device. Using the OpenManage Mobile (OMM) app, you connect to it over Bluetooth and view all server information, alerts and the health status of hardware components.

We run the OpenManage Enterprise (OME) software in the lab as a Hyper-V VM and after it discovered the server’s iDRAC9, we could manage and monitor it, control power and run remote control sessions. Add an OME Enterprise Advanced license and you can use the Power Manager plug-in to view historical graphs of server power consumption plus thermals and as long as the server has a valid support contract, you can integrate OME with the free CloudIQ cloud hosted service to receive server telemetry and predictive analytics.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R650xs review: Verdict

Dell EMC’s PowerEdge R650xs is a great choice for businesses with moderate workloads to satisfy and a close eye on their budget. It may be a cost-optimised model but this superbly built 1U rack server offers a powerful specification at a good price, and has very few compromises for storage and expansion potential while remote management services are simply the best.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R650xs specifications

Stepping in at the entry point of Dell EMC’s extensive range of rack servers, the PowerEdge R250 aims to offer SMBs an affordable solution that can handle a wide range of business applications. It packs a lot into its short-depth 1U chassis, bringing Xeon E-2300 processing power to the table along with a big helping of fast memory, plenty of storage options and room to grow.

Prices start at £950, which gets you a basic dual-core 3.5GHz Intel Pentium G6405T CPU partnered by 8GB of DDR4 memory. Our review system is a lot more powerful, as the price includes a quad-core 3.1GHz Xeon E-2324G CPU and 32GB of memory, which can be boosted to 128GB for memory-hungry workloads.

The R250 is restricted to a maximum of four front drive bays, but you can choose from LFF and SFF hard disks and SSDs, with the backplane in our system adding hot-swap capabilities. It was also equipped with an HBA355i PCIe adapter card, which doesn’t provide RAID but adds support for SAS3 storage.

If you want RAID there are plenty of choices, with the server supporting most of Dell EMC’s PERC controllers. The entry-level H345 offers stripes and mirrors for SATA and SAS devices, while the top-dog H755 brings RAID5 and 6 into the equation.

You can keep all the drive bays for storage duties by adding Dell EMC’s boot optimised storage solution (BOSS) S1 card, which has two M.2 SATA SSD slots and can be used as a mirrored array for running an operating system. It will cost you a PCIe slot, though, as the R250 doesn’t support the BOSS S2 version used by the higher-end PowerEdge servers that present two removable M.2 carriers at the rear for easier access.

A cheaper alternative that doesn’t occupy a PCIe slot is the internal microSD module (IDSDM) card. This also supports mirroring, fits in a dedicated motherboard slot and costs around £110 with a pair of 32GB cards.

The server presents a tidy interior with easy access to all key components for upgrades and maintenance. Four cold-swap fans look after the CPU, memory and the pair of PCIe 4 expansion slots, and we found the server runs very quietly.

The drive backplane connects to the HBA355i card with a single cable and is far tidier than the basic four-cable drive option. Note that the R250 supports a single Bronze or Platinum 450W PSU so you’ll need to consider the more advanced PowerEdge R350 if you want power redundancy.

For the best remote server management, however, look no further. The R250 sports Dell EMC’s iDRAC9 embedded controller with dedicated Gigabit port. Its slick web console provides a wealth of information on server operations, and you can use it to remotely configure RAID arrays and directly access its BIOS menus.

We run Dell EMC’s OpenManage Enterprise (OME) server in the lab, which we used to keep a close eye on the R250. Adding an OpenManage Advanced licence to its iDRAC9 console enabled the Power Manager plug-in for viewing system consumption and thermal values.

Larger businesses will love the free CloudIQ cloud-hosted service, which provides machine learning plus server telemetry and predictive analytics for all their Dell EMC systems. Functioning as a CloudIQ collector, OME sends telemetry and alert logs to it every 15 minutes, and the only requirement for the R250 is a valid support contract.

CloudIQ provided plenty of information on the R250, including a proactive health score, full hardware inventory and 24-hour performance views for CPU and memory utilisation, power consumption and temperatures. The views can be customised with filters, and we used the reports section to create custom performance dashboards for selected server metrics.

The PowerEdge R250 is a great entry-level rack server for SMBs, delivering a powerful hardware package at a good price. It offers plenty of expansion space, a high memory capacity and unbeatable remote management features.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R250 specifications

Growing SMBs that need an affordable and scalable entry-level rack server should head over to Dell EMC’s PowerEdge range. The R250 is a good starting point, but for those that want more storage options and greater expansion potential, the R350 on review is a worthy contender.

Along with room up front for four LFF or eight SFF hot-swap drives, this 1U rackmount server supports a choice of eight Dell PERC RAID cards – twice that of the R250. There’s more as it has enough internal real estate for Dell’s smart BOSS (boot optimised storage solution) S2 adapter card with dual hot-swap M.2 SSDs.

It’s also ideal for those with limited space as this 1U rackmount server has a short 585mm depth so it’ll slot into a wall-mount cabinet. This shortness doesn’t come at the cost of features either, as the R350 supports the entire family of ten Xeon E-2300 CPUs and has a maximum memory capacity of 128GB.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R350 review: Design and build

The R350 is very well-built. Removing the lid reveals a tidy interior with cabling neatly tucked away and unrestricted access afforded to all key hardware components. Underneath a plastic air shroud to the right, you’ll find the single CPU socket with the 6-core 2.9GHz Intel Xeon E-2336 in our system topped off with a solid passive heatsink.

The standard heatsink is rated for CPUs up to an 80W TDP so if you specify the 95W Xeon E-2386G or E2388G chips, you’ll get a larger one. To the side of the CPU are four DIMM slots and the price we’ve shown includes a single 32GB stick of 3,200MHz DDR4 memory, leaving three spare slots for boosting this to the maximum 128GB.

Cooling for all versions of the R350 is handled by a bank of four cold-swap, dual-rotor fan modules lined up in front of the motherboard. We initially found their noise levels quite noticeable but after playing around with the management settings and changing the default thermal fan profile to the Sound Cap option, this was reduced considerably.

The 350W hot-plug Bronze PSUs in the previous generation R340 have been upgraded in the R350 to more powerful 600W Platinum 80 Plus models. The server can be run with just one, but our configuration has dual PSUs for added redundancy.

The motherboard offers a pair of embedded Gigabit ports and further expansion is facilitated by a riser card with a PCI-E 4 slot on each side. Both accept half-length (HL), half-height (HH) cards with Dell offering dual or quad port Gigabit and dual copper or SFP+ 10-Gigabit adapters.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R350 review: Storage variables

The R350 supports twice as many PERC cards as the R250 because it has a mount point and connector on the drive backplane for a front RAID card with four versions available. Our system came with an entry-level PERC H345 Front Load adapter which provides SAS3 and SATA support along with hardware-managed RAID0, 1 and 10 arrays - the 700-series of adapters extend these to RAID5 and 6 plus battery protected cache memory.

The H345 card is cabled through to the motherboard and Dell has been quite clever here as there’s a dedicated PCI-E 4 PERC side slot below the riser cage. This has a dual purpose as it accepts standard adapter PERC (aPERC) cards while in our case, it was occupied by a simple front PERC (fPERC) pass-through card servicing the H345 adapter.

For general storage duties, we’ve included two 480GB SATA SSDs but Dell offers a big choice of SAS and SATA HDDs and SSDs. We can’t see many SMBs tempted by Dell’s high capacity models though, as they’re a bit pricey with a 4TB read-intensive SATA SSD costing nearly £3,000.

Still, you won’t need to use them for the operating system as the BOSS S2 card is designed specifically for this task. Tucked up next to the PSU bay, it presents two M.2 SATA SSD slots in hot-swap carriers that can be easily accessed from the rear and we’ve included one with dual mirrored 240GB SSDs.

A hypervisor hosting alternative to the BOSS S2 is Dell’s internal dual SD module (IDSDM) card which has two SD Card slots, supports mirroring and fits in a dedicated slot at the front of the motherboard. If you’re happy to run a hypervisor on a single USB stick, the slot also accepts Dell’s internal USB 3 card which only costs £26.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R350 review: Management choices

It may be an entry-level server but the R350 sports the same iDRAC9 remote controller and dedicated Gigabit port as its bigger PowerEdge brothers. Its smart web console presents a wealth of information on server operations plus a full hardware inventory and direct access to BIOS and storage configurations.

You can choose from five licenses - Basic and Express are very similar, with the latter adding real-time power and temperature graphing. If you want full remote OS control and remote media services though, you’ll need an Enterprise license, while the Datacenter option adds advanced services such as streaming telemetry.

All PowerEdge servers can be managed and monitored from the free OpenManage Enterprise (OME) software which we run in the lab as a Hyper-V VM. Adding an iDRAC9 OME Enterprise Advanced license enables the Power Manager plug-in and as long as you have a valid support contract, you can use the free CloudIQ cloud hosted service which provides server telemetry and predictive analytics.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R350 review: Verdict

The PowerEdge R350 will appeal to SMBs as this entry-level rack server combines Xeon E-2300 power with a high expansion potential, making it a good long-term investment. Storage options are plentiful too, and you won’t find better remote management facilities anywhere else either.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R350 specifications (as reviewed)

Businesses looking for an affordable rack server that can handle a wide range of general-purpose workloads will find the PowerEdge R450 could be just the ticket. Stepping up to the entry-point of Dell EMC’s dual-socket rack server family, the R450 targets SMB applications such as small IT infrastructure duties along with modest virtualisation services.

It packs a fine hardware package into its 1U height with plenty of processing power on tap thanks to a choice of seven Xeon Scalable Gen 3 CPUs. Our review system was furnished with a meaty pair of 24-core 2.1GHz Gold 5318Y modules – the highest the R450 can handle – but you can save a pile and opt for a more modest 8-core 2.8GHz Silver 4309Y.

Memory doesn’t see any real limits either, and the R450 can handle up to 1TB. Our system came tooled up for some memory-intensive action; the price includes a healthy 128GB of DDR4 memory spread across eight 16GB DIMMs.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R450 review: Storage options

The R450 is available with four hot-swap LFF drive bays or, in our case, eight SFF bays. The motherboard does have a basic embedded PERC S150 SATA controller for software-managed RAID arrays, but this is largely redundant as the R450 is offered with a choice of Dell EMC’s PERC hardware RAID cards which also bring SAS support into the equation.

Our server sports a PERC H745 Front SAS card which slots smartly into a dedicated bay right above the drive carriers, plugs directly into the backplane and is linked to the motherboard with a single cable. It supports all the usual RAID array suspects, including 5 and 6, plus it comes with a cache-protecting battery backup unit (BBU).

A good choice of SATA and SAS HDDs and SSDs are offered for the R450 but NVMe SSDs are off the menu. If you want these in 1U of rack space, you’ll need to consider moving up to the cost-optimised PowerEdge R650xs.

Dell’s BOSS (boot optimised storage solution) card does away with the need to put the OS on a hard disk but the R450 supports the older S1 version which doesn’t have the removable M.2 SSD carriers found in the later S2 model. The R450 has enough room between its two expansion card risers for a dedicated PCI-E slot where the BOSS-S1 card nestles, and we’ve priced the system up to include a pair of mirrored 480GB SSDs.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R450 review: Remote management

The R450 is blessed with Dell EMC’s iDRAC9 controller which sets the standard for remote management. Its smart web console presents a wealth of information on system and component status, power usage and cooling efficiency, along with a full hardware inventory plus direct access to BIOS and storage configurations.

Costing only £115, the Quick Sync 2 module is a must-have feature for support staff that want walk-up diagnostics on their mobile device. Using the OpenManage Mobile (OMM) iOS app on an iPad, we connected to it over Bluetooth by scanning the QR code on the server’s pull-out system tag.

From our iPad, we could view all server information, alerts and the health status of hardware components. Other useful tools include facilities to directly access the iDRAC9 web console and use its built-in VNC server to remotely control the server’s operating system.

We run the OpenManage Enterprise (OME) software in the lab as a Hyper-V VM and after it discovered the server’s iDRAC9, we could manage and monitor it, control power and run remote control sessions. With an OME Enterprise Advanced license added to our iDRAC9, we could use the Power Manager plug-in to view graphs of server power consumption and thermals going back up to a year.

As long as the server has a valid support contract, you can integrate it with the free CloudIQ cloud hosted service, which provides server telemetry and predictive analytics. Installing the CloudIQ plug-in allows OME to operate as a collector where it sends its logs every 15 minutes. This means CloudIQ can provide a proactive health score, hardware inventory and 24-hour performance graphs of CPU and memory utilisation, power consumption and temperatures.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R450 review: Internal design

Cracking the lid reveals a well-designed interior that afforded us easy access to all key components. The two Gold CPUs are topped off with chunky passive heatsinks and flanked by a total of 16 DIMM slots supporting up to 64GB RDIMM modules - although these bad boys will set you back over £1,600 apiece.

At the rear are two risers, each offering a PCI-E Gen 4 expansion slot for a low-profile, half-length adapter card. There’s room for further network expansion as sitting underneath the risers is an OCP 3 mezzanine edge slot. with Dell EMC offering a choice of multi-port Gigabit, 10GbE and 25GbE cards from Intel, Broadcom and Marvell.

The R450 supports dual PSUs and our system included two 800W Platinum models running in fault tolerant mode. Also available are high-power 1,100W PSUs, while systems with a single CPU can get away with cheaper 600W models.

Cooling is handled by a bank of seven standard cold-swap, dual rotor fans arranged behind the drive backplane and although they do a good job, we recommend ensuring there is unobstructed air flow around the server. We found the Gold 5318Y CPUs get quite hot during operation, with the iDRAC9 temperature monitor showing them running at 80℃ in idle.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R450 review: Verdict

The R450 is a good choice for SMBs and larger businesses that want a rack-dense solution for running a wide range of general-purpose applications - although if you choose the core-dense Gold CPUs, be mindful of cooling requirements. That aside, this 1U rack server offers a good specification for the price, and if remote server management is a high priority, then you’ve come to the right place.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R450 specifications (as reviewed)

Dell EMC is bringing high-density processing to a rack near you, thanks to a new PowerEdge R650 model which squeezes a remarkable specification in a low-profile 1U chassis. As you’d expect, support for Intel’s 3rd-generation Xeon Scalable CPUs gets top billing, but the R650 offers a lot more besides, including a sharp focus on improved internal design, increased expansion and more storage choices.

The system on review showcases these features nicely, and was supplied to us with a pair of 28-core 2GHz Intel Xeon Scalable Gold 6330 CPUs. Providing you’re prepared to limit your storage and expansion ambitions, it can also handle Intel’s top-dog 40-core Platinums and their thirsty 270W TDPs.

We also received a generous 256GB of 2,933MHz DDR4 memory, with the R650 supporting a maximum capacity of 2TB with RDIMMs and 4TB when using LR-DIMMs – but note that the R650xs model is optimised for virtualized environments and only has 16 DIMM slots. The R650 also supports up to 16 Intel Optane PMEM 200 modules and our system came with eight 128GB sticks nestling between the DIMM modules.

General storage options look good too, as along with a wide choice of embedded RAID controllers, the chassis can handle up to ten standard SAS/SATA SFF HDDs and SSDs, as well as NVMe SSDs. As with the older R640, it has room at the back for another 2-bay cage which also supports NVMe SSDs.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R650 review: Internal layout

Cracking the R650’s lid reveals a similar layout to the PowerEdge R750, as it too sports a T-shaped motherboard. Locating the PSUs on each side of the chassis reduces hotspots and the R650 uses smaller form-factor models, which allows extra exhaust lanes to be created to assist with CPU cooling.

All cooling is handled by a bank of fans in front of the motherboard and the type will be determined by a number of factors. Standard fans can be used if the CPUs have TDPs up to 165W, but the presence of the 205W TDP Gold 6330 CPUs and PMEM 200 memory in our system requires a bank of eight high-performance Gold fans. High power CPUs have slightly different T-shaped heatsinks that extend an extra radiator bar across their attendant bank of four fans. Dell EMC also offers a direct liquid cooling (DLC) kit for the R650 that features proprietary leak detection systems and shutdown services.

Overall, the internal design is very tidy, with the R650 affording easy access to all components for maintenance and upgrades. It’s put the extra room to good use too, as it offers a big memory boost over its predecessor with the DIMM slot count going from 24 to 32. On top of that, it supports 16 PMEM modules as opposed to 12.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R650 review: Expansion and management

Expansion sees big improvements as well: along with three x16 PCI-E 4 slots, there’s room for an OCP 3.0 mezzanine edge slot, extending support to open-standard network cards from other partners, as well as Dell’s own offerings. RAID options get a major update too, as a dedicated slot on the backplane hosts the new PCI-E 4 PERC 11 controllers. We have the PERC H755 front SAS model on test, but other options include the PERC H755N, which allows the server to present a full house of NVMe SSDs.

The smaller PSUs also free up enough space to tuck the new BOSS (boot optimized storage solution) S2 card into the right-hand corner of the chassis. Conveniently, its dual M.2 SATA hot-swap carriers can be easily accessed from the rear without disturbing the server.

Speaking of convenience, remote server management doesn’t get any better than this, and the iDRAC9 controller offers a wealth of valuable features presented in a tidy web console. You can keep a close eye on all aspects of server operations, view performance and directly access its BIOS menus. Meanwhile, Dell EMC’s OpenManage Enterprise (OME) software presents a central console for managing all your servers with the Power Manager plug-in adding system consumption and thermal monitoring. The new CloudIQ hosted service even goes one step beyond this, linking up with OME via a plug-in and providing machine learning and predictive analytics for your entire infrastructure.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R650 review: PMEM 200 features and performance

You’re spoilt for choice when it comes to configuring Intel’s Optane PMEM 200 modules. They can be set up from the server’s BIOS boot menu, the iDRAC9 remote web management console, Windows PowerShell or Intel’s open-source IPMCTL utility. In all cases, you set your goal and choose between Memory Mode, App Direct or a mixture of both and set percentages for each mode. In App Direct mode, the R650 supports the BIOS-level option to apply encryption and passphrase protection to secure their contents.

To test pure PMEM storage performance, we created two interleaved App Direct regions each using four Optane modules so they were spread equally across the CPU’s memory channels. With Windows Server 2019 at the helm, we could see two 504GB persistent memory disks, which we used to create a single Storage Space with one mirrored virtual disk.

Performance is simply stunning. Iometer reported raw sequential read and write speeds of 47.6GB/sec and 3.8GB/sec, with random speeds settling at 41.8GB/sec and 3.9GB/sec. Dropping down to 4KB blocks saw great throughput numbers; Iometer returned sequential read and write rates of 1,110,655 and 773,160 IOPS while random operations returned 1,083,330 and 739,288 IOPS.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R650 review: Verdict

Organisations that want more power to their racks will find the PowerEdge R650 presents a great combination of high-performance CPUs, expansion potential and storage features in a space-saving 1U chassis. Internal design is exemplary, remote management features just keep on getting better and we found Intel’s Optane PMEM 200 modules in App Direct mode deliver a staggering storage performance.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R650 specifications (as reviewed)

Supermicro offers one of the largest choices of rack servers on the planet, and its A+ Server 1114S-WN10RT brings the latest generation of AMD EPYC power to enterprise applications such as virtualization, cloud computing and all-Flash storage. Only available as a completely assembled system, our review system was kitted out and supplied to us by UK-based reseller Server Factory.

Founded over 10 year ago, Server Factory specializes in Supermicro products and offers a large portfolio of server, storage, HPC and cloud solutions. Working with a wide range of global customers, it claims to provide high-level support and a fast, low-cost service for complete systems and components.

The 1114S-WN10RT packs a lot into its modest 1U height; it supports a single core-heavy AMD EPYC 7002 CPU and is certified for all models up to a 280W TDP. Once a BIOS upgrade is available, you can also opt for one of the new high-performance EPYC 7003 ‘Milan’ models.

Supermicro A+ Server 1114S-WN10RT review: Storage

Businesses with a need for fast storage will find a lot to like here as the server has room up front for ten high-performance PCI-e 4 NVMe SSDs. Server Factory added a little variation here with the last two bays cabled up to support lower-cost SATA SSDs.

More storage options are available, too. The Supermicro H12SSW-NTR motherboard has two SATA DOM (disk on module) slots and Server Factory supplied Windows Server 2019 for us on a 128GB module. You also have a couple of on-board 22110 M.2 NVMe/SATA SSD slots - although as with all AMD EPYC motherboards, no embedded RAID is provided so you can’t protect your OS with a mirrored array.

Value looks good as along with a couple of 960GB Intel SATA SSDs, the price includes two 960GB Kioxia PCI-e 4 NVMe SSDs. Kioxia makes some big performance claims so we checked these out by running Iometer on one of them.

Although below the top quoted speed, a sequential read rate of 6,650MB/sec is certainly nothing to sniff, at while a write rate of 1,398MB/sec is bang on the money. Dropping to 4KB block sizes saw Iometer report random read rates of 498,500 IOPS – again below the quoted speeds - but our random write rate of 85,880 IOPS was over 71% higher than Kioxia’s claim.

Supermicro A+ Server 1114S-WN10RT review: Design and expansion

At first glance, the server presents a tidy interior but closer inspection of the NVMe interface and motherboard power cables on the right-hand side raised concerns. Four of the eight embedded dual-port NVMe sockets are right next to the motherboard’s main power connectors and none of these cables had been cleanly routed and secured, making it impossible to close the lid without squashing them.

We were also a bit peeved to find the 180-day evaluation period of the OS had already expired and that Server Factory hadn’t installed the drivers for the AMD chipset, network ports or graphics controller. It was easy enough to rearm the OS and load the drivers but we would have been more impressed if the server had been prepped properly and ready for action out of the box as we had requested.

Cabling complaints aside, the rest of the server provides easy access to all components for upgrades. The system was supplied with a hefty 32-core EPYC 7502P CPU partnered by a generous 128GB of 3,200MHz DDR4 memory and there’s room for a lot more, as the server’s 16 DIMM slots allow this to be boosted to a massive 4TB.

The system offers dual embedded 10GBase-T network ports and expansion looks good: the single riser has two full-height PCI-e 4 slots on one side and a low-profile slot on the other. These high-bandwidth slots add extra versatility as they can support 50GbE and 100GbE network adapters.

Supermicro A+ Server 1114S-WN10RT review: Cooling, power and management

The EPYC 7502P may have a high 180W TDP but the server’s cooling arrangements work very efficiently. The six dual-rotor fan modules behind the drive backplane rarely went above 5,200 rpm, resulting in commendably low noise levels. Power is also well-served, and the system was fitted with dual 750W hot-swap 80+ Platinum PSUs.

Remote management and monitoring see major changes thanks to Supermicro’s latest integrated IPMI 2.0 controller, which proudly shows off a completely revamped web console. This is a vast improvement over the older version. Its home page opens with a new dashboard that presents a detailed overview of the server’s status, a power consumption graph, one click access to remote control, a list of recent log events and a floating toolbar with remote power controls.

A ribbon menu across the top provides quick access to storage views, detailed lists of all hardware components, remote firmware update tools and all sensor readings. The new component view is much easier to access and uses a similar layout to Dell’s iDRAC9, where each one has its own tab across the top with colour-coded icons for visual warning of detected issues.

Access security is tight - you can enforce LDAP, Active Directory or Radius authentication and apply account lockout counters to failed login attempts. Another bonus is full OS remote control and virtual media services are included as standard – Dell and HPE expect you to cough up for a license to activate these features on their servers.

Supermicro A+ Server 1114S-WN10RT review: Verdict

An important part of our review process is evaluating customer support and we felt that Server Factory could have done a more professional job of preparing the server and making sure it was dressed to impress.

That said, the hardware itself isn’t unworthy of your time; the A+ Server 1114S-WN10RT does deliver a powerful AMD EPYC package for the price, teams it up with fast all-Flash storage and offers plenty of room to expand.

Supermicro A+ Server 1114S-WN10RT specifications

If you need a powerful server that will fit into the smallest of spaces, the CyberServe Xeon E-RS100-E10 fits the bill perfectly. It delivers a quality hardware specification, with a good set of storage options, in a 1U chassis that’s just 384mm deep.

Broadberry uses an Asus RS100-E10-PI2 barebones system as its base, kitting it out with a speedy 3.4GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E-2224 CPU. The price includes 16GB of DDR4 memory, but the board will accept 32GB DIMMs, so you can boost the RAM to a maximum 128GB if needed.

Storage capacity is impressive too, considering the modest size of the server. The drive cages on either side each support either one large form factor (LFF) hard disk or two small form factor (SFF) SSDs, and one big advantage of going with Broadberry is that it allows you to fit your own choice of drives without invalidating the warranty. On top of this, the Asus P11C-M/4L motherboard sports a pair of M.2 SSD slots that will accept either SATA or NVMe cards at lengths up to 110mm, and Broadberry has populated these with a pair of 250GB Samsung Evo 860 SATA SSDs. These are ideal for running your OS from and can be protected against failure by the C242 chipset, which incorporates an Intel RSTe RAID controller supporting stripes, mirrors and RAID5 arrays.

Fitting and exchanging disks is easy because the interior of the server is impeccably tidy, with all cables secured and neatly tucked out of the way. This ensures that all drive cages are very accessible, and if you’re installing a pair of LFF drives, you’ll find the necessary SATA and power cables ready and waiting.

Networking connections are well served by a quartet of onboard Gigabit Ethernet ports and a riser card offers a spare PCIe 3 x16 slot, which can be used for a 10GbE network card. Alternatively, you may prefer to add an Asus PIKE II RAID card, which allows you to step up to faster 12Gbits/sec SAS3 storage.

Cooling is handled by three dual-rotor fans; Asus describes these as “Zen-quiet”, but we think that’s a rather generous description. With fan speed set to auto mode in the BIOS, we measured sound levels of 49.5dB from a metre in front – not too intrusive, but noticeable.

For management, the Asus ASMB9-iKVM plug-in module is included, which provides a web interface offering plenty of information and email alerts for critical components and sensor readings. It isn’t as sophisticated as Dell EMC’s iDRAC9 or HPE’s iLO 5 but it has the advantage of including full OS remote control and virtual media services as standard, rather than as chargeable upgrades.

You can also make use of the Asus Control Center (ACC) software, which uses Windows agents to monitor any server brand. It’s provided in the form of an OVA virtual machine file and can be tried for free for 180 days, after which a three-year licence costs £60 per managed client. We tested it with Oracle VirtualBox and had no problem using the web console to scan the lab network and push agents to our Windows servers.

The console proved admirably informative, correctly identifying all our servers and presenting a wealth of detail on system vital signs including CPU, memory, storage and network port utilisation, along with full hardware and software inventories. Separate accounts can be created with different console access permissions and warning thresholds for each hardware component may be linked up with email alerting rules.

In all, the CyberServe Xeon E-RS100-E10 represents a cracking hardware specification at a great price. Although it isn’t as quiet as Asus implies, we love the low-profile chassis, the fine selection of remote-management tools – and the freedom to fit your own drives.

Broadberry CyberServe Xeon E-RS100-E10 specifications

Rack servers can play a number of different roles in a business – but Dell EMC’s PowerEdge R340 is versatile enough to suit almost any of them. Its short-depth 1U chassis delivers Xeon E-2200 processing power, along with flexible storage arrangements and good expansion potential.

The system we tested includes a quad-core 3.4GHz Intel Xeon E-2224 CPU. It also comes with twice as much RAM, meaning you get 32GB of ECC DDR4 to play with out of the box – but note that the maximum memory provision is limited to 64GB, as Dell EMC’s firmware doesn’t currently support the full 128GB addressable by Xeon E-2200 CPUs.

One of our favourite things about Dell EMC servers is their management framework. The embedded iDRAC controller presents a slick web portal with a detailed status overview and a whole heap of data on system and component temperatures, cooling, voltages and power usage.

It’s not limited to hardware monitoring, either: the iDRAC console can also provide system inventory information and even give you access to the RAID controller for storage configuration. Full OS remote control and virtual media services aren’t included unless you spring for an iDRAC9 Enterprise licence – but we think that’s a worthwhile upgrade, and have included it in the price shown above.

It’s possible to monitor and manage the server from a mobile device too, using the OpenManage app for Android and iOS. We installed it on our iPad and were then quickly able to view the server’s status, pull up a list of hardware and receive alert notifications on health issues. This particular server can’t be managed over Bluetooth, however, as there isn’t a space for the optional Quick Sync 2 Bluetooth module.

Still, it can accommodate plenty of storage permutations. The model we tested has four LFF hot-swap bays, but you can choose eight SFF bays instead. RAID options are flexible too, with the basic system using an embedded PERC S140 controller to provide software-managed mirrors, stripes and RAID5 arrays for SATA drives. Smart Value configurations such as this one add a PERC H330 card, which works with 12Gbits/sec SAS drives as well, though it doesn’t support any additional array types.

Another option is to choose Dell’s HBA330 card – a simple non-RAID controller that presents up to eight SAS3 channels – and use a software solution such as Microsoft’s Storage Spaces to take care of pooling and mirroring drives.

No matter which approach you go for, you don’t need to worry about running out of expansion slots. The disk controller card gets a dedicated PCIe slot on the side of the motherboard, leaving both slots in the riser card available for whatever upgrades you fancy. Dell EMC offers a range of Gigabit and 10GbE adapters to complement the server’s dual embedded ports.

If you’re looking to maximise your storage, it’s also worth considering Dell EMC’s BOSS (Boot Optimised Storage Solution) card. This adds a pair of M.2 SATA SSDs to house your operating system, allowing you to dedicate all full-sized drives to data. It’s expensive, though, costing £446 for the dual 240GB SSD version. A slower but cheaper alternative is the Internal Dual SD Module (IDSDM) card, which supports mirroring, fits in a dedicated motherboard slot and costs £100 with a pair of 16GB SD cards.

The PowerEdge R340 is a versatile little rack server with plenty to recommend it to a small business. Some optional upgrades are pricey, but Dell EMC’s remote management services are top-notch and there’s plenty of expansion space to keep up with growing needs.

Dell EMC PowerEdge R340 specifications

When looking to outfit data centre servers and storage arrays, the high performance of NVMe SSDs makes them a natural choice, but the current range of M.2 and U.2 form factors pose significant restrictions on applications and density. The EDSFF (Enterprise & Data Center SSD Form Factor) specification addresses these limitations, however, and in this hands-on review, we look at one of the first production servers to support these new storage devices.

Broadberry’s CyberStore Xeon SP2-136 showcases AIC’s ‘Grays Peak’ FB128-LX 1U rack server, which has room up front for no less than 36 hot-swap EDSFF NVMe SSDs. The system was supplied to us with six 4TB Intel DC P4511 SSDs, so a full house of these diminutive devices delivers an impressive 144TB of raw storage density.

Formerly known as ‘Ruler’ SSDs, Intel’s DC P4511 adheres to the E1.S (short) standard, employs 64-layer, 3D NAND TLC technology and presents a standard PCI-E 3.1 x4 connector. A card width of only 5.9mm allows it to deliver this high storage density and Intel claims it’s three times more thermally efficient than bulkier U.2 SSDs.

Broadberry CyberStore Xeon SP2-136 review: Storage

The CyberStore is well designed and built with all SSDs presented in small hot-swap carriers across the front panel. Air flow and cooling are aided by the carrier’s perforated front panel and each SSDs is fitted with slim-line heat spreaders on their upper and lower surfaces.

Internally, everything is just as tidy as a single backplane board with integral switches services all SSD bays and is directly connected to the motherboard’s two PCI-E risers with four ribbon cables. A key advantage of this arrangement is you don’t need to sacrifice any expansion slots to PCI-E switch HBAs.

Other less interesting storage features are the pair of M.2 slots on the motherboard. Supporting both SATA and NVMe M.2 modules, these can be used to run an OS on a mirrored array, leaving all your EDSFF SSDs available for data storage duties.

You have a number of choices as to how you employ the SSDs; with Windows Server 2019 at the helm, we could configure them as individual devices and use Storage Spaces to create pools with simple, mirrored or RAID5 virtual disks. Broadberry also offers an optional Intel VROC (Virtual RAID on CPU) key which plugs into the motherboard and enables hardware-managed stripes, mirrors, RAID10 and RAID5 arrays.

Broadberry CyberStore Xeon SP2-136 review: Performance

For the DC P4511 E1.S SSD, Intel quotes sequential read and write rates of up to 2,800MB/sec and 2,400MB/sec, along with random read and write throughputs of up to 610,200 and 75,000 IOPS. We used a range of benchmarking tools including Iometer, ATTO and CrystalDiskMark and saw figures that generally agreed with these.

Using a single SSD, we recorded up to 2,785MB/sec and 2,247MB/sec for sequential read and write operations. We couldn’t reach the top random read throughput claims - with our tests returning best speeds of 481,288 IOPS - but random write rates of 94,590 IOPS were noticeably higher.

We also tested a four-SSD RAID10 array created using the VROC Windows utility. It’s easy to use, but be careful with SSD placement, as arrays that span across multiple controllers can’t be used as bootable volumes.

Performance was very impressive; we recorded top sequential read and write rates of 9,531MB/sec and 4,950MB/sec. I/O throughput was good too, with the array returning high random read and write speeds of 769,300 and 465,400 IOPS.

Broadberry CyberStore Xeon SP2-136 review: Features

The CyberStore is also well-specified in other departments, and the price includes a pair of 2.2GHz 10-core Xeon Scalable Silver 4120 CPUs teamed up with a generous 256GB of DDR4 memory. These CPUs can handle up to 1TB of memory - but bear in mind that these Silvers only support maximum memory speeds of 2,400MHz.

There’s plenty of room to expand, as well. Along with dual embedded Gigabit ports, the motherboard offers two OCP 2.0 mezzanine card slots and two free PCI-E slots. The server supports plenty of industry-standard adapters and mezzanine cards, so you can easily boost network speeds to 25GbE, 50GbE or 100GbE.

SSD health monitoring is handled by Intel’s handy MAS (Memory and Storage) Windows utility, which provides valuable information on each SSD such as remaining life and temperatures. It’ll also tell you what partitions are present on each SSD - although we did notice that it is unable to show temperatures for individual members of VROC managed RAID arrays.

Remote server management and monitoring are provided by an embedded AST2500 management controller – the same as used by Gigabyte. It isn’t up to the standards set by Dell EMC’s slick iDRAC9, but does provide plenty of detail on critical components with graphical readouts on hardware sensors, fan speeds, temperatures and voltages.

Cooling is handled by a bank of seven dual-rotor fans spread out between the motherboard and SSD backplane. Noise levels aren’t excessive with our iPad measuring sound levels of 65dB from one metre, although unlike the Gigabyte variant of the AST2500, the AIC version doesn’t include fan profiles to control their speeds.

For centralized multi-server management, you’ll need to source your own SNMP monitoring solution; whereas Gigabyte offers its free Server Management web console, AIC doesn’t provide any extra utilities. However, AIC does include full OS remote control and virtual media services as standard and not as chargeable license upgrades.

Broadberry CyberStore Xeon SP2-136 review: Verdict

The CyberStore Xeon SP2-136 signals a new direction for enterprise storage, packing an impressive amount of high-speed E1.S NVMe SSDs into a low-profile, rack-dense chassis. Remote management features are more basic than most, but the CyberStore won’t be faulted for its high storage performance and the price includes a solid supporting hardware package with a generous dose of memory, dual Xeon Scalable CPUs and plenty of room to expand.

Broadberry CyberStore Xeon SP2-136 specifications

Server manufacturer Gigabyte made a calculated move when AMD launched its second generation of core-dense EPYC CPUs. While the blue-chips chickened out and waited to see what demand would be, Gigabyte went full steam ahead and produced no less than 28 EPYC 7002 rack server solutions – more than four times the rest put together.

Gigabyte’s range is really quite remarkable: you can choose from 1U, 2U and 4U rack chassis with single or dual CPU sockets, plus 2U quad node hyper-converged systems. Memory choices range from eight to 32 DIMM slots, all supporting eight-channel DDR4, while there’s just about as many storage options as you can think of.

On review we have Broadberry’s CyberServe R182-Z90 which showcases Gigabyte’s 1U 2P rack platform and delivers a hardware package that defies belief. The price we’ve shown includes a pair of mighty 32-core 2.9GHz AMD EPYC 7542 CPUs teamed up with a generous 128GB of super-fast 3,200MHz DDR4 ECC memory.

With 64 physical cores up for grabs, enterprises that don’t want 4P or 8P platforms won’t find a better value solution this this - a single 28-core Xeon Scalable Platinum 8280 CPU alone will cost you more than this entire server. And of course, while Intel snoozed, AMD went ahead and produced the world’s first 7nm CPU.

Broadberry CyberServe R182-Z90 review: Build and design

The CyberServe chassis is very well constructed and removing the lid reveals a smartly designed interior affording easy access for upgrades and maintenance. The dual EPYC 7002 sockets are located towards the front of the motherboard and flanked on each side by a total of 32 DIMM slots, allowing memory to be boosted to a massive 4TB.

Expansion options are very good for a 1U chassis; the server offers two PCIe Gen4 x16 slots on risers both with room for full-height, half-length adapter cards. The extra bandwidth of these Gen4 slots means the server can support the latest high-speed 50GbE and 100GbE network adapters.

Of equal interest are the two OCP (Open Compute Project) slots at the rear. Along with an OCP 2.0 Gen3 slot, the server has an OCP 3.0 Gen4 version and its tool-free design allows industry-standard mezzanine cards to be easily slotted in from the rear without needing to open the server’s lid.

All of Gigabyte’s servers support every EPYC 7002 CPU including the 48 and 64 core models. Furthermore, they are certified to support a cTDP (configurable TDP) of up to 240W which offers a potential performance boost and can be manually set from the server’s BIOS.

Broadberry CyberServe R182-Z90 review: Storage features

The CyberServe comes with four hot-swap LFF/SFF drive bays across the front. No drives are included but the server comes with Gigabyte’s nifty tool-free drive carriers as standard and Broadberry allows you to install your own choice of drives without invalidating its warranty.

Two on-board four-port SATA connectors are provided but the motherboard doesn’t have any embedded RAID, so you’ll need to source an extra controller. Broadberry offers a good range of hardware RAID adapters, with the MegaRAID 9341-4i option delivering all the usual RAID suspects plus SAS3/SATA device support for the princely sum of £200.

The motherboard also has a single M.2 NVMe slot and the price includes a 1TB Intel 660p NVMe SSD card. This is a useful feature as you can run your OS or hypervisor from it and reserve all four front bays for data storage duties.

More storage choices are on the table for Gigabyte’s 1U systems. For example, the CyberServe R182-Z91 model comes with eight hot-swap SFF and two NVMe SSD bays. Businesses that want maximum storage performance may prefer the R182-Z92 version which sports a full complement of ten hot-swap U.2 NVMe bays.

Broadberry CyberServe R182-Z90 review: Power, cooling and management

The system was supplied with a meaty pair of 1200W hot-plug redundant power supplies and AMD scores another win over Intel thanks to the EPYC’s low power demands. The EPYC 7542 CPUs may have a high 225W TDP but we recorded the system drawing 110W in idle and peaking at only 446W with all 128 logical cores under maximum load – a 1U rack server in the lab with dual 28-core 2.7GHz Platinum 8280 CPUs peaked at a much higher 672W.

Cooling is handled efficiently by a bank of eight cold-swap, dual-rotor fans behind the drive backplane. Operational noise is noticeable but not excessive for such a powerful system, and we measured sound levels of just 61dB from one metre in front of the server.

Gigabyte has improved its remote management offerings with the embedded AST2500 IPMI controller presenting a freshly designed web interface packed with valuable information. Its new dashboard keeps you posted on all critical issues and you can dive deeper to view hardware sensors, link their thresholds to email alerts, control power and run full OS remote control plus virtual media services.

Gigabyte’s Server Management (GSM) utility offers a web console that provides a status and power dashboard for remotely monitored systems along with views of installed hardware and sensors, fan speed graphs and tools for remote firmware upgrades. Free mobile apps are also available and we used the iOS version on our iPad to link to the central GSM server and view graphs on system availability and health.

Broadberry CyberServe R182-Z90 review: Verdict

With the blue chips offering such a meagre selection of AMD EPYC 7002 rack servers, Gigabyte is clearly the place to go if you want a powerful system that precisely matches your workload and budget. Broadberry’s CyberServe R182-Z90 teams up a truly remarkable hardware package with a huge core density and is ideal for SMBs and enterprises that want maximum processing density in their racks at a price that core-dense Intel Xeon Scalable systems can’t hope to compete with.

Broadberry CyberServe R182-Z90 specifications

Short depth rack servers are a great choice for space-constrained SMBs, and they don't get much smaller than HPE's ProLiant DL20 Gen10. Don't be fooled by its modest dimension though - the 41cm deep 1U chassis delivers a powerful hardware package and room to grow with demand.

It offers plenty of horsepower too: you can choose from seven Xeon E-2100 CPUs or save some extra cash and opt for a basic Pentium G5400 or Core i3-8300 model. We can't see the point in skimping in the CPU department though, as the Performance model we were supplied with sports a six-core 3.3GHz Xeon E-2136 CPU and yet only costs a mere 740.

Not only that, but the price also includes a decent 16GB of 2,667MHz UDIMM DDR4 memory with room inside to upgrade to the maximum 64GB. If you do choose a Pentium G5400 or Core i3-8300 CPU, bear in mind they'll drop the memory speed to 2,400MHz.

The DL20 Gen10 can satisfy a wide range of storage requirements as well, as its chassis can be ordered with dual LFF bays or up to six SFF bays. Other stand-out features include its embedded iLO5 remote management controller and expansion potential.

HPE ProLiant DL20 Gen10 review: Storage features

Prices for entry systems start as low as 480 for the P08335-B21 model, which has a base 8GB of memory, a quad-core 3.3GHz E-2124 CPU and a pair of non-hot-plug (NHP) LFF disk bays. You can order hot-plug LFF drive bays if you wish, and they're all managed by the server's embedded Smart Array SR100i controller which supports stripes, mirrors and RAID5 arrays.

The model on review is equipped with a quartet of hot-plug SFF drive bays. There's room in the front panel for an optional SATA optical drive or you can improve your storage prospects further by adding an extra two-bay SFF cage.

The SR100i only has a four-port mini-SAS port on the motherboard so for six-drive configurations and SAS support, you'll need an HPE Smart Array RAID card. We suggest the Essential Smart Array E208i - a modular controller which snaps into the motherboard's dedicated AROC connector, supports eight SAS3/SATA drives and provides hardware-managed RAID5 arrays, mirrors and stripes.

You'll be in no doubt about drive status and activity, as HPE's hot-swap SFF carriers are crammed with LEDs. Their white LED also helps avoid costly mistakes; any carrier with this light illuminated mustn't be removed while the server is running. This safety measure is applicable where drives are configured as non-RAID or are in a striped array.

HPE ProLiant DL20 Gen10 review: Build quality

The server is very solidly built and its tidy internal design will make light work of maintenance and upgrade maneuvers. Cracking the lid reveals a small motherboard sitting in the right-hand half of the chassis with the CPU close to the front and serviced by a pair of small dual-rotor fans.

Four DIMM slots sit next to the CPU socket and a plastic guide alongside channels air flow where it's needed. A third dual-rotor fan sits in the middle of the chassis and directs its air flow towards the expansion riser card.

Two choices of riser card are available, with the standard one offering a PCIe 3 slot on each side. The other riser option has a FlexibleLOM interface on the side and supports HPE's low-profile quad-port Gigabit, dual-port 10GbE or converged dual-port 10/25GbE adapters. Entry models get a single 290W fixed PSU while our Performance model is endowed with a 500W hot-plug model and a second bay alongside allowing you to add another for power redundancy.

The embedded iLO5 chip shares access with the first of the server's two Gigabit ports but you can push this out to a dedicated port with HPE's upgrade kit. Costing around 75 and slotting in behind the CPU, the card provides a dedicated management port and also has two M.2 NVMe SSD slots plus a serial COM port.

HPE ProLiant DL20 Gen10 review: Deployment and management

HPE's Intelligent Provisioning feature makes light work of OS deployment. We selected this menu option during boot-up, chose our OS from its list, pointed it at the virtual ISO drive we'd mapped to the server and left it to load Windows Server 2019 and all required drivers with no further intervention required.

Unsurprisingly, remote management is tops. HPE's iLO5 software is among the best around, and its web console is packed with information about the server's status and provides direct links to HPE support. You can keep a close eye on all critical components, but you'll need to upgrade the Standard license to an Advanced version if you want full OS remote control, virtual media services and power metering.

With the server's iLO5 details added to the lab's virtualized Hyper-V OneView app, we could keep an eye on CPUs, power usage plus temperatures, control power and run remote control sessions. We also declared the iLO5 to HPE's iLO Mobile iOS app and received precisely the same high level of detail about server operations as presented by the standard web interface.

Enterprises and service providers managing multiple HPE servers will like HPE's free iLO Amplifier Pack which is available for VMware and Hyper-V. It presents a web management console for discovery and inventory of up to 10,000 Gen8, Gen9 and Gen10 servers and also links up with HPE's InfoSight for iLO4 and iLO5 performance monitoring and predictive fault analysis.

HPE ProLiant DL20 Gen10 review: Verdict

The ProLiant DL20 Gen10 packs an impressive range of features into its compact dimensions and will be a big hit with space-poor SMBs. Storage options are extensive, remote management features are beyond reproach and HPE delivers them all at very affordable prices.

HPE ProLiant DL20 Gen10 specifications

To complement its launch of the 'Cascade Lake' Gen2 Xeon Scalable CPUs, Intel has revamped its Server System family and now offers an extensive range of ready-made servers to suit just about any business requirement. In this hands-on review, we look at Broadberry's CyberServe Xeon SP2-R1208 which showcases Intel's new R1208WFTYSR 1U chassis and S2600WFTR 'Wolf Pass' motherboard.

The 'R' at the end of their model names indicate they've been updated to support all Xeon Scalable generations, so you can easily tailor the system to your workload and budget. For this review, Broadberry has pulled out all the stops and supplied a monster system with dual 28-core 2.7GHz Platinum 8280 CPUs and 192GB of fast 2,933MHz DDR4 memory.

Aimed at demanding enterprise applications such as AI, cloud services, real-time analytics, virtualisation and clustering, the CyberServe also has a few surprises in the storage department. Along with twin embedded M.2 NVMe SSD slots, the chassis supports up to eight hot-swap SFF drives and eight PCIe NVMe SSDs.

Broadberry CyberServe Xeon SP2-R1208 review: Storage features

Measuring only 72cm deep, the CyberServe may be comparatively short in depth, but don't be fooled - it's definitely not short on features. You can specify four LFF or eight SFF hot-swap bays and the latter comes with a multi-function backplane offering two 4-port SATA/SAS connectors and eight OCuLink ports for direct-attached NVMe SSDs.

An additional four embedded OCuLink ports are presented on the motherboard which can be connected directly to the backplane using Intel's cable kits. If you want eight NVMe SSDs, you'll need to specify Intel's optional 4-port PCI-E switch card, which costs around 205.

The motherboard has two embedded mini-SAS connectors both cabled through to the hot-swap drive backplane for SATA support. The backplane is 12Gb/sec SAS ready and you can add one of Intel's SAS RAID mezzanine cards in the dedicated slot. he RMS3CC080 module, for example, supports eight SAS3 drives, 1GB of battery protected cache and RAID6 arrays.

That's not all; two embedded M.2 NVMe SSD slots are provided as well, and the price includes a 256GB Intel NVMe SSD 760p card which we used to install Windows Server 2019. You can fit a second M.2 card, sadly but RAID is only supported if both are SATA modules.

Broadberry also includes a high-performance 375GB Intel Optane P4800X PCI-E card which accounts for nearly 1,000 of the asking price. That's a substantial chunk, but you're getting your money's worth - Intel claims a top sequential read rate of 2,400MB/sec and in our Iometer tests, we verified this with a recorded rate of 2,433MB/sec.

Broadberry CyberServe Xeon SP2-R1208 review: Processing, cooling and power

The Platinum 8280 CPUs support 1TB of memory per socket and the motherboard offers 24 DIMM slots. If you want more capacity, the 8280M pushes this to 2TB per socket while the 8280L SKU extends this to a massive 4.5TB.

Intel confirmed to us that this system is certified for 205W TDP CPUs but a downside of these higher-capacity chips is their higher cooling requirements. We found the six dual-rotor fan modules ramped up to 14,000rpm during testing, which got very noisy indeed - from one metre in front of the rack, we measured a noise level of 75dB. That's about as loud as the average vacuum cleaner.

There are benefits too, though: the CPUs add support for Intel's Optane DC Persistent Memory, which can be fitted in the standard DIMM slots and is offered in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities. Each CPU supports up to six modules which can be configured to behave as memory or storage devices.

The system was supplied with a 1100W PSU and you can add a second for power redundancy. As expected, power consumption is fairly high; we measured the system in idle consuming 140W which rose to 672W with all 112 logical cores under extreme load from the SiSoft Sandra benchmarking app.

Broadberry CyberServe Xeon SP2-R1208 review: Networking and remote management

The motherboard comes with a pair of embedded RJ-45 10GbE ports and its OCP (open compute project) module bay allows you to add more without losing a PCI-E slot. The price includes an extra dual 10GbE SFP+ OCP card but Intel also offers modules with quad copper or SFP Gigabit and dual copper 10GbE.

Remote server management is present courtesy of Intel's RMM4 Lite hardware key, which enhances the integrated BMC and activates the dedicated Gigabit port. Its web console doesn't come close to HPE's outstanding iLO5 or Dell's superlative iDRAC9 management consoles for features. but it does provide sensor views of critical components and issues email alerts if values exceed their predefined thresholds.

The controller maintains an event log, has a new view added for NVMe drives and includes full remote control and virtual media as standard features and thankfully not as optional extras. It also provides full remote control of server power and tools for remote firmware upgrades and BIOS configuration.

You can use Intel's free Active System Console (ASC) for local and remote server monitoring via a web browser. This handy utility provides plenty of valuable information about hardware while the server is running and you can link its email alerting service with multiple policies for increased flexibility.

Broadberry CyberServe Xeon SP2-R1208 review: Verdict

The CyberServe Xeon SP2-R1208 is offering an incredibly powerful hardware package in a compact 1U form factor. The price may seem high, but bear in mind the twin 28-core Platinum 8280 CPUs alone account for over 80% of this and support for a wide range of Xeon Scalable CPUs means you can easily customize the server to suit your budget.

The drawbacks of this particular specification are the high fan noise levels and power consumption, as well as the fact that Intel's remote management tools are comparatively basic. On the plus side, it offers a versatile range of storage features teamed with support for Optane DC persistent memory plus 2,933MHz DDR4 memory - and all at a price that the blue chips will have trouble matching.

Verdict

It may look pricey, but the CyberServe Xeon SP2-R1208 is offering a massively powerful, core-heavy 1U rack package that’s ready to take on any enterprise workload

2017 has been an excellent year for technology and hardware. Consumers have been wowed by the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S8 and a list of redesigned Apple products, while businesses have been able to take advantage of unparalleled processing power thanks to servers from companies like HPE and Dell.

With such a wealth to choose from, it's hard to pick which products have been most impressive, but with some careful thought, we've sifted through the year's launches to bring you IT Pro's top products of the year.

Best laptop

Winner - Apple MacBook Pro

Apple's top-end MacBook models are widely regarded as the gold standard in business-class notebooks, and with good reason. Combining a sleek and stylish design with nigh-unbeatable performance thanks to 2017's upgraded Kaby Lake model, the MacBook Pro is an absolute powerhouse for everyone from developers to designers.

It's not entirely without problems - we wish Apple had included a couple of ports besides Thunderbolt 3, for example, and the Touch Bar version has some battery life problems - but features like the ultra-shallow keyboard and mammoth trackpad set it apart from its competition.

Highly commended - Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon

Another heavyweight in the enterprise hardware space, Lenovo's venerable ThinkPad range has a sterling pedigree. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is sturdy, reliable and well-suited to tasks of all stripes, with a truly excellent keyboard and finely-tuned features for businesses.

Best tablet

Winner - Apple iPad Pro

Apple has thoroughly dominated the tablet computing category this year - and not just because it's been one of the only companies to release a premium tablet. The company's devices have been sophisticated, powerful and portable, and the iPad Pro is the perfect combination of all three.

The Apple Pencil support made it an excellent choice for designers and artists, but now that Apple has introduced a file manager and a suite of proper multi-tasking capabilities, the iPad Pro can genuinely be considered as a laptop replacement. Showcasing the very best of Apple's design abilities, both the 10.5in and 12.9in iPad Pro models are the pinnacle of tablet design.

Highly commended - Apple iPad

If you can't quite bear to part with the 620 starting price of the iPad Pro, Apple's entry-level iPad makes a handy compromise. While it doesn't have the full range of productivity features seen on the Pro range, the basic iPad is still sleek and speedy enough for day-to-day use.

Best 2-in-1

Winner - Microsoft Surface Pro

One look at how many companies have aped the design of Microsoft's flagship convertible should give you a good indication of how popular the Surface Pro is. The kickstand design is elegant and intuitive, and the keyboard is one of the most satisfying typing experiences we've had, whilst also being amazingly thin and light.

There's no compromise on components, either; the 12.3in screen is pin-sharp and absolutely gorgeous to boot, and one of Intel's seventh-generation processors provides a serious amount of oomph. Forget compromise; this 2-in-1 does everything a laptop can, and then some.

Highly commended - HP Elite X2 Folio

While it's definitely borrowing some design inspiration from the Surface Pro, the HP Elite X2 Folio brings a few things to the table that Microsoft's device doesn't. It's user-upgradeable, for example, which could end up saving corporate IT departments a whole heap of time and money in the long term.

Best Chromebook

Winner - Google Pixelbook

Chromebooks aren't just cheap and cheerful laptops for schools, and Google's out to prove it with the Pixelbook. A razor-thin body and eye-catching design is backed up by surprisingly powerful internal hardware and all the AI-powered software features you'd expect from a flagship Google product.

What's more, improvements to Chrome OS and the ability to run Android apps mean that the Pixelbook is (very nearly) as versatile and capable as a standard Windows laptop. It's expensive, but it's liable to inspire serious notebook envy wherever you go.

Highly commended - HP Chromebook 13

At around 600, the HP Chromebook 13 is much more affordable than the pricey Pixelbook, without making too much of a compromise on design or performance. Like most Chromebooks, it'll struggle with seriously heavy-duty workloads, but for general tasks, this lightweight machine should perform very well indeed.

Best smartphone

Winner - Samsung Galaxy S8

2017 has been a truly excellent year for smartphones, and the Samsung Galaxy S8 has been firmly leading the charge. The first major smartphone out of the gate with an edge-to-edge OLED display, the S8 set an example followed by companies like OnePlus, Honor and even Apple.

Combine this with one of the best smartphone cameras we've ever seen, super-quick internals and a very capable battery life, and it all adds up to a device that's very attractive indeed. Move over, iPhone; there's a new king in town.

Highly commended - Google Pixel 2

The follow up to last year's surprise hit, the Google Pixel 2 is a deeply impressive piece of technology powered by intelligent AI features and smart UI design. Its real selling-point is an absolutely world-class camera, which has yet to be beaten by any other smartphone. Were it not for a slightly underwhelming screen, the Pixel 2 would be topping our list this year.

Best 1U server

Winner - Dell EMC PowerEdge R640

The Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 is part of the company's recently-launched 14th generation of servers, and Dell has pulled out all the stops to cram this space-efficient 1U rack server full of storage and power. Not only does it have full support for Intel's Xeon Scalable processors, it's also got some mightily impressive storage options.

On top of that, Dell's iDRAC9 management console is a smash hit, offering a comprehensive overview of operational information, security-centric features and outstanding remote management and administration capabilities. It's every bit the equal of HPE's superb iLO5 controller.

Highly commended - Lenovo ThinkSystem SR630

Expansion potential is the name of the game here, with Lenovo's ThinkSystem SR630 offering plenty of internal space for further upgrades, despite a compact 1U form factor, and Xeon Scalable processor support for improved performance. More importantly, the XClarity Controller will make remote management a breeze.

Best 2U server

Winner - Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd

The first server in Dell EMC's 14th-generation PowerEdge line, the PowerEdge R740xd is an excellent example of what customers can expect from the company now that the merger between Dell and EMC has been completed. Remote management capabilities have been improved, and EMC's expertise has been put to use with a superb array of storage features.

It's also a powerful showcase of Intel's relatively new enterprise-grade Skylake-SP Xeon processors. The R740xd supports the whole family, all the way up to Intel's 28-core Platinum Xeon monster, and its sheer processing power is tough to beat. Blue-chip vendors, take note: this is how it's done.

Highly commended - HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10

Like the PowerEdge, HPE's tenth-generation flagship 2U server features Xeon Scalable processor support and extensive storage options. It's an improvement over the previous iteration in just about every way, and it's got the huge room for expansion too, making it a great option for growing businesses.

Best tower server

Winner - HPE ProLiant ML110 Gen10

Smaller businesses on a tighter budget may think that cutting-edge Xeon Scalable servers are out of their reach, but not anymore. The 10th-generation update to HPE's ProLiant ML110 tower server brings SMBs excellent performance coupled with generous expansion options.

It also comes with HPE's outstanding iLO5 management controller, providing plenty of remote management, monitoring, and security features. For smaller organisations that want a heavyweight server without the top-end price tag, this is an excellent choice.

Highly commended - Fujitsu Server Primergy TX1320 M3

If you're tight on space, Fujitsu's smallest-ever tower server will be right up your street. Not only that, but it's also great value. Combine that with beefy Xeon processors and heaps of clever design features to make the most of the limited internal space, and you've got a very capable package.

Best security appliance

Winner - WatchGuard Firebox T70

The biggest thing that the WatchGuard Firebox T70 has going for it is its virtually unbeatable price. Not only is it extremely competitive, it's also one of the highest-performing desktop appliances we've ever seen, with 4GBits/sec firewall throughput.

It's bundled with a year's subscription to WatchGuard's enterprise-class software suite too, including anti-spam, anti-virus and web-content filtering, as well as a Gold-level support subscription. Lastly, it has top-notch monitoring features for ultimate peace of mind.

Highly commended - Kerio Control NG300W

The Kerio Control NG300W is one sturdy UTM appliance, with four Gigabit Ethernet ports, a 2.4GHz Intel Atom CPU, and an inbuilt heatsink. It doesn't fall down on security features either, offering a comprehensive and well-rounded package. The only absence is anti-spam features, but otherwise, it's an excellent security appliance.

Best storage array

Winner - HPE MSA 2052 Storage

HPE has raised the bar with its 5th-gen MSA 2052 storage appliance, doubling the performance of an already-excellent array whilst keeping it at the same wallet-friendly price as its predecessor.

Performance is accordingly excellent, and it's twinned with a load of powerful features to make virtualisation, deployment, and recovery as easy as possible. Considering that it includes HPE's full suite of data tiering capabilities as well, it's a steal.

Highly commended - Broadberry CyberStore 224S-WSS rack

Despite going up against titans like HPE, Dell EMC, and Fujitsu, Broadberry was first out of the gate with a Windows Storage Server 2016 appliance - and for a very attractive price, too. On top of that, the Broadberry CyberServe 224S-WSS comes with 26 hot-swap SFF drive bays, heaps of network connection options, twin Intel Xeon E5-2620 v4 processors and 64GB of RAM.

Best NAS drive

Winner - Qnap TS-1685 desktop

For those that want high-volume desktop storage capabilities, it's hard to beat Qnap's TS-1685. Not only does it feature 16 hot-swap drive bays, it's also got blazing network performance thanks to its four 10GbE Ethernet ports, and support for expansion via additional PCIe cards.

You'll be hard-pressed to match its performance in terms of disk read and write speeds as well. Add in a whole heap of backup and storage features, and the TS-1685 is a superb addition to any small office setup.

Highly commended - Netgear ReadyNAS RN426

Data protection is top of the priority list for this SMB-friendly NAS drive. Backup performance is excellent, with cloud sharing, disaster recovery and snapshot features aplenty. It's also nice and hardy, thanks to its rock-solid steel construction.

Best printer

Winner - Xerox VersaLink C400DN

The first thing that's likely to attract SMBs Xerox's VersaLink C400DN is the low price, but one of the most useful features is the large variety of onboard apps available for it, including heaps of cloud and network printing tools. It's also one of the rare printers that supports wired and wireless networking simultaneously.

Print quality is absolutely superb, delivering razor-sharp and detail-packed pictures and documents at exceptional speeds. As if that wasn't enough Xerox offers a lifetime on-site warranty - all you have to do is buy a toner pack in the last 60 days of your warranty period, and the company will renew it for another year. Can't say fairer than that.

Highly commended - Brother MFC-L8900CDW MFP

Although its initial purchase price isn't as attractive as some of its rivals, this A4 laser printer makes up for it with a battery of excellent cloud and security features, combined with speedy, high-quality prints. Running costs are reasonable, too, so TCO shouldn't be a problem later down the line.

Enterprise network security usually costs a king's ransom but WatchGuard's Firebox M5600 bucks the trend by delivering a wealth of features at a more palatable price. It may only be a 1U rack appliance but it's plenty powerful, with WatchGuard claiming a 60Gbits/sec firewall throughput and 11Gbits/sec with all UTM services enabled.

Targeting distributed environments of up to 7,500 users, the M5600 offers a versatile range of port options. The appliance has four expansion slots at the front and comes with the eight copper Gigabit and quad 10GbE SFP+ port modules as standard.

The two spare slots accept any module so you can add eight more 10GbE ports if you wish. However, the clincher is WatchGuard's dual-port 40GbE fibre module, as few competing vendors offer this as an option.

The M5600 is powered by elderly 10-core 2.8GHz E5-2680 v2 Xeon CPU teamed up with 16GB of DDR3 memory, while internal storage is handled by a 2GB CFast card and 250GB LFF SATA hard disk. Dual 400W PSUs come as standard, as do four hot-plug fan modules - but this combination produces annoyingly loud noise levels.

Price

The price may initially seem steep but it looks a lot more appealing when stacked up against the competition. The price we've shown includes the M5600 appliance and a full three-year subscription to the Total Security Suite, which activates everything WatchGuard has to offer.

Along with the firewall, VPNs and 24x7 Gold LiveSecurity support, it enables IPS, web content filtering, anti-spam, gateway anti-virus, application controls and HTTPS inspection, plus WatchGuard's reputation enabled defence, advanced persistent threat (APT) blocker service and data leak prevention (DLP) module.

There's more; WatchGuard's RED (reputation enabled defence) service is included for increased web protection. Web access requests send the URL in question to WatchGuard's RED cloud servers where they score it and instruct the appliance to either allow or block it.

To put the outlay into perspective, SonicWALL's top-of-the-line SuperMassive 9800 2U appliance (its E10xxx range recently went on EOL notice) starts at over 46K just for the hardware. Add in a three-year subscription to its Comprehensive Gateway Security Suite and the price jumps to nearly 100K.

Deployment

The M5600 is very easy to deploy, as the web interface fires up a wizard to secure administrative access and get Internet access running on an external port along with DHCP services on your first trusted interface. Three operational modes are available and we opted for the mixed routing mode as it's the most versatile.

This mode allows all ports to be defined as separate interfaces where we could set them as external, trusted, optional or custom and add DHCP services on selected trusted ports. Port aliases streamline further configuration and we used these to assign multiple firewall policies to source and destination ports.

WatchGuard uses proxies to handle all traffic and includes ones for HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SIP, IMAP, POP3 and SMTP. The relationship between proxies and actions takes a little while to get the hang of, but on first access, the web console provides a wizard for each one.

Enforcing web content filtering using the WebBlocker service was a three-step process. We chose from over 120 URL categories, applied HTTP and HTTPS filtering and on completion, the wizard created a new firewall rule.

Proxies

Mail security is handled by the spamBlocker service, and to use it we set up the POP3 proxy to tag messages classed as spam, suspect and bulk. It's very effective: in live tests of other WatchGuard appliances, we've seen spam detection rates of 97-98 percent with no false positives.

Within selected policies, we could enable IPS and apply allow, drop or block actions based on five threat levels. Gateway AV is a cinch to set up - you enable it on selected policies and choose actions for virus detections, scan errors, oversized files and encrypted files.

You'll need to enable gateway AV if you want to apply APT protection. As files come in to the network, it scans them, creates an MD5 hash and checks the LastLine cloud service to see if they're known malware.

WatchGuard's application awareness controls access to hundreds of apps and has eleven entries for Facebook alone. DLP is another easy one to configure and uses predefined and custom rules on the HTTP, FTP and SMTP proxies to check for keywords such as credit card or social security numbers.

Security and management

The mobile security service queries Android and iOS devices and blocks access if they don't meet the minimum OS level. To use it on iOS devices, we loaded the free WatchGuard FireClient app and could then set blocking policies for any devices not running the latest OS version.

You can use the M5600 to centrally manage wireless networks that employ WatchGuard's own APs. Once paired with the appliance, they take all their settings from it and you can apply selected security policies to wireless traffic.

The appliance's web console provides plenty of detail about all activity and we also used WatchGuard's Dimension software on our Hyper-V host for centralized monitoring. It provides an impressive amount of information such as global threat maps and security service graphs and with Dimension Command activated, you can only log in to an appliance's web console from Dimension's interface.

Verdict

Considering the price of the hardware, we would have liked a newer Xeon CPU and more memory (plus quieter fans) but performance is impressive and there's no denying the M5600's security credentials. WatchGuard offers a wealth of easily managed enterprise-grade security services at a price the competition will have trouble matching.

Verdict

WatchGuard’s flagship M5600 UTM appliance is a great choice for enterprises that want tough and easily deployed network security at a more sensible price

As reviewed

Chassis: 1U rack

CPU: 2.8GHz Intel Xeon E5-2680 v2

Memory: 16GB DDR3

Storage: 2GB CFast 3SE SATA card, 250GB LFF SATA HDD

Network: 8 x Gigabit, 4 x 10GbE SFP+

Expansion: 4 x module slots (2 free)

Other ports: Gigabit management, 2 x USB 2, RJ-45 serial

Power: 2 x 400W hot-plus PSUs

Management: Web browser, WatchGuard Dimension/Command

Warranty: 3-year advanced hardware replacement

Dell's PowerEdge R640 aims to deliver a balanced combination of storage, processing power and rack density, and in this exclusive review, we bring you a first look at its new 14th-gen 1U rack server. Naturally, Intel's Xeon Scalable family is at the top of Dell's agenda and a new internal cooling design allows the R640 to support every CPU model right up to the 205W 28-core Platinum 8180.

Storage options are equally impressive, as the chassis is available with four LFF, eight SFF or ten SFF drives. There's room for two more SFF drives at the rear in an optional hot-swap cage and the server can support up to eight PCIe NVMe SSDs out of the box.

Hard disks are all handled by Dell's 10th-gen PERC controllers which have 8GB of flash-backed NV cache memory - a quadrupling over the previous generation. The new H740P and H840P adapters are SAS3 ready and their Harpoon-based RoC (RAID on chip) provides a performance boost for handling high-IOPS SSDs.

All 14th -gen PowerEdge servers showcase Dell's new iDRAC9 remote management controller, which delivers a completely revamped web interface and a wealth of new features. Platform security is tight as well and includes cryptographically-signed firmware packages plus a lockdown mode to stop unauthorized system configuration changes.

Storage options

Dell offers a lot of storage options so ensure you make the right choices to avoid future upgrades. All three Smart Flexi Value models are offered with eight or ten SFF drive bays with only the standard model supporting four LFF bays.

The SFF models offer two backplanes with the 8-bay version supporting SAS3, NL-SAS and SATA hard disks. We review the 10-bay version - which you'll need if you want to use PCIe NVMe SSDs as well as SAS3 hard disks.

The Xeon Scalable CPUs increase the number of PCIe lanes from 40 to 48 and Dell's NVMe implementation takes advantage of this. The 10-bay backplane is plugged into a SAS expander board behind it, but also has onboard NVMe connectors cabled directly to the motherboard.

These use the eight extra PCIe lanes allowing you to direct-attach up to eight NVMe drives in the front bays without requiring extra adapter cards. Mind you, they aren't cheap; Dell's 3.2TB mixed-use NVMe drives cost over six grand apiece.

Dell's BOSS (boot optimized storage solution) card does away with the need to put the OS on a hard disk. Included in our review system, the BOSS is a PCIe adapter card with dual M.2 SATA SSD slots which supports mirroring.

Internal design

There's a lot going on inside the R640's busy interior but all cabling is neatly tucked out of the way for easy access to key components. Eight hot-plug fan modules reside in front of the motherboard and for NMVe drives and higher-end CPUs, you'll need to specify high-performance models.

The price includes the PERC H740P Mini snap-in RAID module. This supports all the usual RAID suspects including RAID6 and 60 and has 8GB of NVRAM cache with a battery backup pack tucked away neatly on top.

Our system came with 192GB of 2,667MHz DDR4 memory which can be boosted to 768GB using RDIMMs or 1.5TB with LRDIMMs. The R640 also supports up to twelve Persistent Memory NVDIMM-N modules which combine 16GB of high-performance DRAM with integral Flash backup and use a dedicated battery backup module which fits on top of the SAS expander board.

Up to three PCIe expansion slots are available and underneath their cage is a dedicated slot for Dell's network daughtercards. We were supplied with the dual Gigabit/10GBase-T model and other options include quad Gigabit, quad 10GbE SFP+ or dual 25GbE.

Server management and security

Dell's new iDRAC9 is a winner for remote management as its smart HTML5-based web interface delivers a veritable wealth of information on server operations. The Dashboard screen provides a quick view on overall system health plus quick access to logs and a virtual remote control console.

The System tab reveals everything you need to know about power consumption or cooling and provides performance graphs for CPUs, memory and I/O usage. Activating the System Lockdown mode blocks any further configuration changes and you can use the System Erase feature to safely destroy data on decommissioned drives.

Dell scores over HPE's iLO5 with its Quick Sync 2 feature which we used to link our iPad to the server over Bluetooth. The OpenManage Mobile (OMM) iOS app allowed us to view all server information, receive alerts, reboot it and control it using the free VNC Viewer app.

Dell's OpenManage Enterprise isn't due for release until mid-2018 but while you're waiting, you can use its free OpenManage Essentials software. We employed it to manage all our Dell network devices, perform inventories and activate its advanced alerting system.

Verdict

The PowerEdge R640 packs a lot into its compact 1U chassis and delivers some innovative storage features as well. Support for the entire family of Xeon Scalable CPUs means it can easily be customised to suit a wide range of workloads and budgets while the new iDRAC9 controller sets new standards for server management.

Verdict

The powerful PowerEdge R640 squeezes a remarkable range of features into its 1U chassis making it the ideal choice for enterprises that want the best rack density in their data centre

Chassis: 1U rack

CPU: 2 x 2.1GHz Intel Xeon Gold 6130

Memory: 192GB ECC DDR4 2,667MHz (max 1.5TB with LRDIMMs)

Storage bays: 10 SFF front hot-swap (supports 8 x NVMe SSDs)

RAID: Dell PERC H730P Mini SAS3/8GB NVRAM cache/BBU

Storage included: 5 x 300GB 15K SAS3 SFF hard disks

Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 6, 50, 60

Network: 2 x Gigabit/2 x 10GBase-T daughtercard

Expansion: 3 x PCI-e 3.0 slots

Other: BOSS card with 2 x 240GB M.2 SATA SSDs

Cooling: 8 x hot-plug performance fans

Power: 2 x 1600W Platinum hot-swap PSUs

Management: Dell iDRAC9 Enterprise

Warranty 3yrs standard on-site NBD

Targeting businesses looking for a high density rack server that can handle demanding workloads, HPE's ProLiant DL360 Gen10 packs a remarkable range of features into its slim-line 1U chassis. Along with support for Intel's core-heavy Xeon Scalable CPUs, it sees a major internal redesign, allowing it to offer an extensive choice of storage options including up to 10 NVMe drives.

In this exclusive review we look at HPE's Performance model 867963-B21, which brings together a pair of Xeon Gold CPUs and teams them up with a decent 32GB of DDR4 SmartMemory. No drives are included in the price, but the chassis has eight SFF hot-swap bays ready and waiting.

Usefully, the 8-bay SFF model we have can be field-upgraded to support 10 NVMe drives. Costing around 740, the kit includes a new backplane and requires all seven cooling fans, which are already fitted in our server so it's ready to go.

In fact, storage versatility is a key design feature of the DL360 Gen10. Even with the NVMe backplane fitted, it allows you to mix up NVMe drives with SAS/SATA SFF hard disks so you can tailor it to fit your workload demands.

Design

HPE has done a fine job with internal design, as it's all remarkably tidy inside. The two 12-core 2.3GHz Xeon Gold 5118 CPUs are fitted with solid passive heatsinks and flanked by 24 DIMM slots, allowing memory to be pushed to a massive 3TB.

There are a couple of provisos though, as the Xeon Gold 5118 CPUs only support memory speeds up to 2,400MHz. Furthermore, if you want to expand to 3TB of memory, you'll need to specify Gold 6100 or Platinum 8100 CPUs with an 'M' suffix as these support 1.5TB per socket.

As this server is a Performance model, it comes with all seven cooling fans lined up between the motherboard and drive backplane. These are the hot-plug variety so they can be replaced without powering the server down, although we found their small size makes them fiddly to remove and replace.

There's plenty of room to expand and the server has two risers at the back offering a total of three PCI-Express slots. You won't need to use them for network expansion though, as the server has quad embedded Gigabit ports and the price includes HPE's FlexibleLOM snap-in adapter with dual 10/25GbE fibre ports.

Storage features

Entry-level models start with HPE's S100i controller chip, which employs the motherboard's three embedded SATA ports to support up to twelve drives and RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 arrays. The S100i can actually handle fourteen drives and the remaining two are used for HPE's new dual uFF M.2 flash cartridge which fits at the rear and only occupies a single SFF drive bay.

All hard disks and NVMe drives use HPE's SmartDrive carriers which are loaded with status LEDs. Their white LED avoids costly mistakes, as any carrier with this illuminated mustn't be removed while the server is running.

The review server comes SAS3 ready and includes HPE's Smart Array P408i-a Gen10 snap-in module, which adds RAID5, 6, 50 and 60 arrays to the storage equation. It includes 2GB of flash-backed write cache (FBWC) protected by a 96W high performance Li-Ion battery.

Virtualization fans will find a pair of internal USB 3 ports for booting into an embedded hypervisor. There's a MicroSD card slot next door for the same function and HPE now offers a dual 8GB MicroSD USB 3 kit for hypervisor redundancy.

Management features

The DL360 Gen10 shows off HPE's new iLO5 management controller and its freshly designed web interface. This is a big improvement over the iLO4 as it provides even more information about critical components, a new agentless management service (AMS), enhanced OS provisioning tools and a big boost in performance.

Security is a key focus as the iLO5's new ASIC uses HPE's Silicon Root of Trust fingerprinting for firmware validation and will stop the server booting if any tampering is detected. The iLO5 firmware is also validated and will be flashed with a fresh copy if it fails this test while the Advanced Premium Security Edition license runs scheduled firmware scans and repair processes.

With the lab's virtualized OneView app updated to v3.1, we added the DL360 Gen10 as a new monitored element. OneView is free if you're only using it to monitor your server and storage environment and we found it provides plenty of information about the CPUs, power and temperatures, plus tools for controlling power and running remote control sessions.

We used HPE's iLO Mobile iOS app on our iPad to remotely access the server and were presented with the same detailed interface as provided by a web browser. It's easy to add the server; we used a free QR code generator furnished with the server's address and credentials and scanned it in from the app.

Verdict

The DL360 G10 is a little powerhouse of a server, ideally suited to rack dense applications requiring a lot of processing horsepower. Support for the entire Xeon Scalable CPU family means it can be easily customized to suit just about any workload and the redesigned storage sub-system makes it highly versatile. Add in the great value and top-notch iLO5 management and security and we have no hesitation in awarding the ProLiant DL360 Gen10 a coveted IT Pro Editor's Choice award.

Verdict

A great choice for power hungry businesses, the low-profile ProLiant DL360 Gen10 is well designed, surprisingly expandable and eminently manageable

Chassis: 1U rack CPU: 2 x 12-core 2.3GHz Intel Xeon Gold 5118 Memory: 32GB ECC DDR4 2,400MHz (max 3TB/2,667MHz) Drive bays: 8 x hot-plug SFF (max 11) Storage: No HDDs included as standard RAID: HPE Smart Array S100i and P408i-a SAS3/2GB with FBWC/BBU Array support: RAID0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60, 1 ADM, 10 ADM Expansion: 3 x PCI-e Gen3 slots Network: 4 x Gigabit, dual 10/25GbE FlexibleLOM Other: Internal USB 2 (2), MicroSD card slot Cooling: 7 x hot-plug fans Power: 2 x 800W hot-plug PSUs Management: HPE iLO5 Standard with Gigabit Warranty: 3yrs on-site NBD

Aimed squarely at cost-conscious SMBs, Fujitsu's Server Primergy RX1330 M2 is a powerful little 1U rack server at a very tempting price. Features haven't been compromised as it supports Intel's E3-1200 v5 Xeon processors, has plenty of expansion capabilities and has a few surprises in the storage department.

The system on review costs a shade under 800 ex VAT. This gets you a 3GHz E3-1220 v5 Xeon, 8GB of DDR4 memory plus four cold-swap SATA LFF drive bays - two of which are populated with 1TB hard disks.

Other CPU choices include a 3.3GHz Pentium G4400 or 3.7GHz Core i3-6100 while a low-cost 2.8GHz Celeron G3900 is available on special order. If you don't fancy any of these, the server is available with seven other E3 v5 Xeon CPUs including 25W and 45W low-voltage chips.

Along with the four-bay LFF model on review, Fujitsu offers a four-bay SFF version that can be field upgraded to eight bays. And then there's the top-dog model that dispenses with the slim-line optical drive and squeezes 10 SFF hot-swap bays into the front panel.

Fujitsu sells a version of the RX1330 M2 with 10 SFF hard disk bays

Cool runnings

The server gets the benefit of Fujitsu's Cool-safe advanced thermal design allowing it to run comfortably in ambient temperatures up to 40 degrees Celsius. Honeycomb style air grills are prevalent throughout the chassis and drive carriers. The most obvious benefit of all this are the reduced noise levels as this server is almost silent.

Cooling is handled by a bank of five dual-rotor fans in front of the motherboard and we could barely hear them during testing. With our iPad placed one metre in front of the server, the SPLnFFT iOS app only recorded 37dB - the background noise level in the lab with all equipment turned off was 35dB.

Entry-level models have a 300W fixed PSU, but our system had dual PSU bays with one 450W power supply included. Overall power consumption is extremely low with the server drawing 30W in idle and peaking at only 67W under extreme load.

This dual PSU model has a clever trick as, instead of fitting a redundant power supply, you can use the second bay for a modular UPS (which Fujitsu calls a FJBU). We weren't provided with one but based on our own power readings and Fujitsu's technical data, we estimate that this battery backup unit will keep the review server running for around 15-20 minutes.

The RX1330 M2 has a simple, clean internal design with room to grow

Storage choices

The four-bay entry-level model relies on the Intel C236 chip and embedded MegaRAID controller to handle storage. The cold-swap drive backplane is cabled to the motherboard's SATA connector with RAID options extending to mirrors and stripes only.

If you want hot-swap capabilities and SAS support you'll need to pick one of Fujitsu's optional RAID PCI-Express cards. First up is the PRAID CP400i which costs around 110 and brings 12Gbps SAS3 into play along with support for RAID5 and 50 arrays.

Next comes the PRAID EP400i which adds 1GB of cache memory but doubles the asking price. If you want dual drive redundant RAID6 arrays then consider the PRAID EP420i. Along with 2GB of cache memory, it supports an optional flash battery backup unit where the cache contents will be written to it in the event of a power outage.

The server has plenty of room inside as it has three PCI-Express riser cards with the first slot dedicated to Fujitsu's modular RAID cards. The server also has space inside for a full-height expansion card if you remove the central riser.

Remote management

The RX1330 M2 is endowed with Fujitsu's embedded iRMC S4 controller and a dedicated Gigabit Ethernet port for remote server monitoring. Its informative web interface displays plenty of information about critical components along with graphs showing power consumption in periods ranging from one hour to a whole year.

The embedded iRMC S4 management chip provides handy power monitoring services

It provides remote power controls while the component status view lists the status of any user replaceable components. Sensor thresholds can be tied in with email alerts, but full server and OS remote control requires an iRMC Advanced Pack license which costs around 200.

Fujitsu's ServerView Suite software provides centralised monitoring and management for all Primergy servers, but its clunky interface looks in dire need of a refresh. Of more use to SMBs is the System Monitor utility which provides a console with graphical information about the server's status, system alert lists, a software update tool and direct access to the iRMC web console.

Fujitsu's ServerView software has plenty of management features but really needs updating

For OS deployment, we booted the system with the ServerView Installation Manager CD and had Windows Server 2012 R2 loaded in around an hour. Pop a micro-SD card in the slot on the motherboard and you can use Fujitsu's eLCM (embedded Lifecycle Management) feature of the iRMC controller to download ISO images and boot the server from them.

The System Monitor displays a tidy status view of the server's health

Conclusions

The Server Primergy RX1330 M2 compares well on price with Dell's PowerEdge R230 and is a superior choice if you want to deploy it in locations such as a small office or library as it's much quieter (around 20dB less in fact). It's well built, has plenty of storage permutations and the optional UPS adds an extra level of versatility.

Verdict

A low-cost, low-profile rack server ideally suited to SMBs that want plenty of expansion options and minimal noise levels

Chassis: 1U rack

CPU: 3GHz Xeon E3-1220 v5

Memory: 8GB UDIMM ECC DDR4 (max 64GB)

Storage: 2 x 1TB cold-swap SATA hard disks (max 4)

RAID: Intel C236

Array support: RAID0, 1, 10

Network: 2 x Gigabit Ethernet

Expansion: 2 x PCI-E x8, 1 x PCI-E x4 slots

Power: 450W hot-plug PSU (max 2)

Management: Fujitsu iRMC S4 Standard with Gigabit Ethernet

Warranty: One year on-site NBD

Multi-node servers are proving a more popular choice than blade servers for rack dense environments. They're cheaper to buy and run, offer equally good processing densities, are easier to scale up with demand and a lot more amenable when it comes to hardware upgrades.

Boston's latest Quattro 1132-T shows these attributes off admirably. This compact 1U rack server houses a powerful pair of nodes each equipped with dual E5-2600 v3 Xeons, a heap of DDR4 memory, plenty of storage permutations and all for less than eight grand.

The system is an all-Supermicro affair comprising its latest SuperServer 1028TP multi-node rack platform. We have the DC1TR model on review which delivers fast SAS-3 RAID protected storage and dual 10GBase-T ports per node.

Other options include motherboards with embedded 56Gbps QSFP Infiniband ports for low-latency server clustering. Lower cost versions are also available that support SATA storage only and have just a pair of 1GbE network ports.

Node and chassis design

The nodes in the review system were fitted with Supermicro's proprietary X10DRT-PT motherboards. Both nodes came with dual 2.6GHz E5-2640 v3 Xeons topped off with chunky passive heatsinks and flanked down the sides by four groups of four DIMM slots.

The node motherboards may be small but they deliver an impressive hardware specification

Each node gets 64GB of DDR4 memory included which can be pushed to 512GB using RDIMMs or 1TB with more costly LR-DIMMs. There's room to expand as the nodes have a small riser card with a 16X PCI-Express Gen3 slot that accepts a half-height, half-width card.

Storage features look good as the boards have an embedded Avago 3108 12Gbps SAS-3 controller supporting stripes, mirrors, RAID5 and 6 arrays. The chassis has two groups of four SFF hot-plug bays at the front and Boston included a couple of 2TB Seagate SATA SFF drives for each node.

Power and SAS-3 interfaces for each node are routed through to an extension bar on the side of their case. As you slide the node into place, this mates with the chassis mid-plane allowing the node to access the dual redundant 1kW PSUs and the group of four hard disk bays directly in front.

Remote management

Each node has an embedded remote management module (RMM) and dedicated Fast Ethernet port. Its web interface isn't as informative as those provided by the likes of Dell and HP, but it does give you plenty of data on critical components and power graphs showing daily, weekly and monthly consumption.

Sensor thresholds can be linked to email alerts and node power can also be controlled from the console. Value looks good as the RMMs have full remote control and virtual media services enabled as standard Dell and HP expect you to buy a license upgrade for these.

Supermicro provides full OS remote control as a standard feature and not as an expensive option

The Multi Node feature proved useful to us as one RMM console showed status views of both nodes with links to swap between them. Supermicro has recently added another tab for storage where we could see installed hard disks, their capacities and temperatures.

You also get the free SuperDoctor 5 SNMP management utility which presents a cheerful interface packed with colour-coded graphs and speedometer-style dials for fans, temperatures and voltages. This has more alerting features so you can send out SMS texts and emails when components go out of kilter.

The SuperDoctor 5 SNMP utility provides a colourful dashboard showing node vital signs

Noise and power

The chassis handles all cooling and has two banks of three dual-rotor fans (one bank per node) located under a removable hatch in front of each node. The system is designed to provide separate thermal zones for each node so problems with one won't affect the other.

The nodes are serviced by 1kW load balanced PSUs and each have three cooling fans

On powering both nodes up we found the chassis fans were running excessively fast and generating high noise levels of around 75dB. We take a dim view of servers that generate a lot of noise as it indicates internal design could be better plus it's a waste of power.

After some investigation, we found the fans on both nodes were set to the Standard Speed mode. Changing this to the PUE (Power Utilisation Effectiveness) mode reduced their speed to around 8,000 rpm with noise levels dropping to a slightly less annoying 65dB.

Changing the cooling fan mode in each node's RMM interface reduced noise levels considerably

Usefully, the fan modes are accessed from each motherboard's RMM interface so they can be modified on the fly without affecting live operations. Once the fan speeds had been reduced, the Quattro returned some low power readings.

With both nodes running Windows Server 2012 R2, we measured the complete system pulling 190W in idle and peaking at 482W under extreme load from the SiSoft Sandra benchmarking app. The 8-core Xeons have 90W TDPs so idle and peak draws per node of 85W and 241W are quite good.

Conclusions

Boston's Quattro 1132-T puts plenty of processing power into 1U of rack space and is a good choice for enterprises that need a high density compute node with all-round redundancy. Node cooling design could be improved as this would reduce power consumption even more, but you'd still be hard pushed to find a multi-node server with embedded SAS-3 storage and 10GbE for less than this.

Verdict

A good choice for high-density compute node clusters, Boston’s Quattro 1132-T delivers a fine hardware specification for the price

Chassis: 1U rack

Power: 2 x 1kW hot-swap Titanium PSUs

Node bays: 2 x hot-swap

Storage: 8 x SAS/SATA SFF hot-swap drive bays (4 per node)

Two server nodes each with the following:

Motherboard: Supermicro X10DRT-PT

CPU: 2 x 2.6GHz Xeon E5-2640 v3

Memory: 64GB DDR4 RDIMM (max 1TB with LR-DIMMs)

Storage: 2 x 2TB Seagate Enterprise SFF SATA drives

RAID: Avago 3108 SAS-3

Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 6

Network: 2 x 10GBase-T

Management: Embedded RMM with 10/100 port

Software: Supermicro SuperDoctor 5

Warranty: 3 years on-site

SMBs and remote offices looking for their first rack server should check out Dell's PowerEdge R330 as it has a lot to offer. Succeeding the venerable twelfth-generation R320, it supports the latest Skylake' Xeon E3-1200 v5 processors and DDR4 memory plus it has improved storage options and performance.

It's not exorbitantly priced either, with prices starting at only 830 ex VAT. This'll get most small businesses out of the starting blocks as it includes a decent quad-core 3GHz Xeon E3-1220 v5 CPU and 4GB of 1.2V DDR4 memory.

Memory capacity is significantly less than the R320 which has six DIMM slots and supports up to 192GB of DDR3. However, for the majority of SMBs, we think the maximum 64GB of faster DDR4 in the R330 will still be enough to handle even their most demanding apps.

Both the R320 and R330 can be ordered with four LFF or eight SFF hot-plug drive bays, but the R330 has a trick up its sleeve as you can sneak a couple of 1.8in SATA SSDs into its optical drive bay and use them as fast-booting mirrored OS drives. It's a little surprising that Dell didn't opt for M.2 or mSATA space-saving SSDs though, as 1.8in SATA SSDs are an increasingly rare breed.

Storage decisions

Cold-swap four-bay systems start with the drive backplane cabled to the motherboard's embedded four-port SATA connector and PERC S130 controller. The dual 1.8in SATA SSD boot option is only available on this chassis though, as you would be expected to use two of the normal SFF bays for this purpose in the eight-drive model.

The S130 supports software-managed mirrors, stripes and RAID5 arrays for SATA drives only. Our review system was supplied with Dell's optional PERC H330 controller card which fits in a dedicated slot and brings 12Gbits/sec SAS and hot-swap support.

The H330 has dual, 4-port mini-SAS connectors and can be used in both the 4- and 8-bay versions of the chassis. It adds support for RAID10 and 50 spanned arrays. Plus, it can be viewed and managed directly from Dell's iDRAC8 remote management console - another useful feature.

If you have a fancy for dual-redundant RAID6 arrays, then you'll need Dell's PERC H730 controller. It uses the same dedicated slot as the H330 and also has 1GB of onboard DDR3 cache memory.

Expansion, noise and power

The R330 slotted easily into our lab's 1000mm server rack cabinet but, at only 24in deep, it'll fit neatly into 800mm data cabinets as well. The server comes as standard with Dell's handy LCD panel which changes colour from blue to orange in the event of an error to provide at-a-glance server status.

Good internal design makes it easy to maintain and upgrade the server. There's room for two PCI-Express slots, but you'll need to add the butterfly riser card when ordering as this isn't included as standard.

Cooling is handled by a bank of three cold-swap fans in front of the CPU and memory sockets. On 4-bay models with the expansion riser card and 8-bay models, an extra fan module needs to be installed in the spare bracket to the left.

We found noise levels to be slightly higher than HP's ultra-compact ProLiant DL20 Gen9. With our iPad placed one metre in front of the servers, the SPLnFFT iOS app recorded 41dB for the DL20 and 53dB for the R330.

The server comes with a single 350W hot-plug power supply and there's room next door for a second redundant PSU. Power consumption isn't a worry as our review system was measured drawing 48W in idle and peaking at only 75W with the CPU under extreme load.

An iDRAC8 Express license provides remote server power control, monitoring and historical graphs

Remote management

Management tools are in abundance with Dell's iDRAC8 providing a tidy web interface with a wealth of status information about critical hardware along with power monitoring and access to the PERC H330 RAID controller. The latter shares access with the first Gigabit Ethernet port, but Dell offers a snap-in upgrade card with a dedicated management port. You will need to upgrade form the included iDRAC Express 8 licence to the iDRAC8 Enterprise license if you want full server and OS remote control.

Dell's iDRAC8 provides direct access to the server's PERC RAID controller

Dell's OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) provides local web-based management while the free OpenManage Essentials (OME) delivers centralised management for all SNMP and WMI enabled systems. It runs regular network discoveries and provides a dashboard showing the status of all systems along with extensive alerting and graphical reporting facilities.

Dell's OpenManage Essentials provides network-wide system monitoring and fault alerting features

Mobile users will like Dell's OpenManage Mobile (OMM) app as it can link up with the iDRAC8 controller. We tested the iOS version on our iPad and found its hardware health status displays and alert notification really useful.

Even better, the OMM app can talk to the server running OME so we could keep a close eye on all our monitored network systems. The app opens with an overview providing coloured icons for swift status views and we could drill down and check alerts, system logs and hardware details.

Dell's OMM iOS app links up with OME and provides mobile users with remote network and system monitoring

Conclusions

The PowerEdge R330 is ideally suited to space-constrained SMBs looking for a powerful first server or to upgrade existing systems to cope with their expanding business apps. The myriad storage options can be confusing but there's no doubting this compact rack server's flexibility and it can't be faulted for features and performance making it good value.

Verdict

A versatile and powerful Xeon E3 v5 rack server that’s good value with plenty of expansion options and a generous remote management toolbox

Chassis: 1U rack

CPU: 3GHz Xeon E3-1220 v5

Memory: 32GB 2,133MHz 1.2V DDR4 (max 64GB)

Storage: 2 x 2TB Dell 7.2K NL-SAS SFF hard disks (max 8)

RAID: Dell PERC H330

Array support: Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 50

Network: 2 x Gigabit Ethernet

Expansion: 2 x PCI-Express 3.0 slots (with optional riser)

Power: 350W hot-plug PSU (max 2)

Management: Dell iDRAC8 Express

Warranty: 1 year basic Next Business Day

The latest ProLiant DL20 Gen9 from the freshly minted Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) squeezes a remarkable range of features into the smallest of chassis. Measuring a shade over 15in. deep, this compact 1U rack server supports Intel's new E3-1200 v5 Skylake' Xeon processors plus fast DDR4 memory as well as plenty of expansion options.

The DL20 Gen9 is surprisingly affordable with prices starting on the right side of 500. The entry-level model has a 3.3GHz dual-core Pentium G4400 and HPE also offers a 3.5GHz G4500, two Core i3-6000 choices plus eight E3-1200 v5 Base and Performance CPU options.

Our review system was fitted with a 3.4GHz quad-core E3-1230 v5 Xeon, 16GB of DDR4 and an upgraded Smart Array P440 PCI-E RAID card. HPE quoted us a list price of 1,273 ex VAT for the system without any drives and street prices will almost certainly be lower.

Storage and SmartDrives

Base systems have two non-hot-plug (NHP) LFF SATA drive bays, but you can order hot-plug drive bays instead. Either way, they're managed by the server's embedded Dynamic Smart Array B140i controller which supports stripes, mirrors and RAID5 arrays.

Alternatively, there is a model with four hot-swap SFF bays which also employs the B140i controller for SATA drives. For more storage performance, HPE offers the Smart Array H240 HBA which adds 12Gbps SAS support to the storage equation.

Our system had a Smart Array P440 HBA fitted which we think is overkill for this server. It supports an optional 4GB FBWC (flash backed write cache) module plus RAID6 and 60 arrays.

HPE's SmartDrive carriers are packed with LEDs with a spinner ring inside the lever shows drive status and activity. We had only one drive configured, so the carrier release button glowed white indicating the drive must not be removed while the server is powered up.

Internal design and expansion

The DL20 Gen9 presents a well-designed interior with easy access to all the important bits. The motherboard occupies the right-hand side of the chassis with the processor located towards the front and serviced by two small fans.

Four DIMM slots sit next to the CPU socket and a solid plastic shroud covers them all for improved air flow. Our system was equipped with two 8GB DDR4 UDIMM modules and the motherboard supports a maximum of 64GB.

A third dual-rotor fan sits in the middle of the chassis and is angled towards the expansion riser card. You have two riser card choices with the standard one offering a PCI-Express x8 slot on each side and another which replaces one slot with a FlexibleLOM interface which accepts HPE's low-profile quad-port Gigabit Ethernet and dual-port 10GbE adapters.

There is another alternative as HPE offers a riser card with a 16X PCI-E slot specifically for its Nvidia Quadro K2200 GPU Module. Virtualisation fans also get a nod as the motherboard has a microSD card slot for an embedded hypervisor.

Power and noise

Entry models get a single 290W fixed PSU, but power redundancy is possible. You can upgrade the server to dual hot-plug 900W PSUs using HP's enablement kit, although this is only supported by models with SFF bays.

The new Xeon made its presence known in our power test with the server drawing only 39W in idle and peaking at 102W under extreme pressure from the SiSoft Sandra benchmarking app. By comparison, a ProLiant DL320 Gen8 v2 rack server with a 3.4GHz E3-1240 v3 Xeon returned idle and peak readings of 54W and 120W.

HP has done a fine job keeping noise levels down making the DL20 Gen9 suitable for a wide range of deployments including small offices. Using the excellent SPLnFFT iOS app on our iPad, we recorded background noise levels of 38dB in the lab with all equipment turned off. With the server turned on and the iPad one metre away, noise levels only rose to 41dB.

Deployment and management

HPE's Intelligent Provisioning feature makes light work of OS deployment. Just select this option during boot-up, choose your OS, point it at the installation file location when requested and leave it to load the OS and all required drivers.

The DL20 Gen9 is endowed with HPE's embedded iLO4 chip so remote management features simply don't get any better. The slick iLO4 web portal provides a wealth of information about operations and critical components, fault alerting and direct access to HP's online support.

The server is supplied with an iLO4 Standard license which includes options for remotely turning the server on and off or rebooting it. You'll need to upgrade to an iLO4 Essentials license if you want full OS remote control and power metering.

HPE's standard setting iLO4 provides a slick 3D graph of critical server temperatures

With the HPE Insight agent installed on the server, we could also access its Systems Management Homepage directly from the iLO4 portal. Note that all critical firmware updates for ProLiant server are provided free of charge, but regular ROM BIOS firmware updates require a valid warranty or support contract.

You'll need an iLO4 Essentials upgrade to get full OS remote control.

The iLO4 Insight Agent provides remote access to the server's System Management Homepage web console

Conclusions

Despite its dainty proportions, the ProLiant DL20 Gen9 has all the credentials for a serious entry-level rack server. It combines a classy set of features with plenty of processing power plus silent running and won't be beaten for value.

Verdict

The ProLiant DL20 Gen9 is ideally suited to expanding SMBs short on space and hungry for more server power

Chassis: 1U rack

CPU: 3.4GHz Intel Xeon E3-1230 v5

Memory: 16GB DDR4 2,133MHz UDIMM (max 64GB)

Storage: 2 x LFF or 4 x SFF drive bays

RAID: HP Smart Array P440 12Gbps SAS

Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 50, 6, 60

Expansion: 2x PCI-E x8 Gen3, FlexibleLOM

Network: 2 x embedded Gigabit Ethernet

Other: Internal USB 3, microSD card slot

Power: 290W fixed PSU

Management: HP iLO4 Standard

Warranty: 1 year on site Next Business Day

Don't be deceived by the miniscule dimensions of Broadberry's new rack server as it packs a heck of a specification. The CyberServe XE5-102S v3 may only be 383mm deep but it has room for dual E5-2600 v3 Xeon CPUs, up to 1TB of DDR4 memory and a lot more besides.

The system is an all-Asus affair comprising its new R9D short-depth 1U rack chassis and Z10PR-D16 motherboard. Designed for businesses that want more from their rack cabinet, it's shallow enough to allow two servers to fit in 1U of space.

Air flow may be an issue but Broadberry has this covered as the server supports back-to-back and front-to-back installations. Asus has two models with the standard RS400-E8-PS2 version having the hard disks at the front and all I/O ports at the back while the F' model has these reversed so you can decide on the air flow direction through the rack cabinet.

And if you change your mind, you can swap them round whenever you want. It isn't a simple process as you need to reverse the cooling fans and move the drive cage and power supply but Broadberry provides a handy step-by-step guide.

The CyberServe's internal design delivers a remarkable hardware density in the smallest of rack spaces

External features

The server's I/O panel is packed with features as you get dual Gigabit plus a dedicated network port for remote server management. VGA, two USB 3 and combined PS/2 ports nestle in there, power buttons are located fore and aft while LED status indicators are provided for the drives and network ports.

Two knockout panels underneath the PCI-Express expansion plates accommodate an optional dual-port 10GbE mezzanine card. Cooling is handled well as both front and rear grills use the same efficient honeycomb design found in Fujitsu's Primergy rack servers.

A smart feature is the bright red Q-code display which provides at-a-glance hardware diagnostics. It shows the initialization status of key components during the boot phase and all the codes are listed in the Z10PR-D16 motherboard manual.

Asus has thought of every power permutation as you can plug it in from the back or front using standard C13 leads. It's also easy on the supply as we measured the server sipping 68W with Windows Server 2012 R2 in idle and peaking at only 111W under heavy load.

The integral ASMB8 management controller provides plenty of detail on all critical hardware components

Under the hood

The CyberServe presents a very well-designed interior and we found all key components easy to get at for routine maintenance and upgrades. We have the RS400-E8-PS2-F model so the six dual-rotor cooling fans are all lined up at the back behind the motherboard.

Directly in front are dual CPU sockets and the price we've shown includes a pair of 1.9GHz 6-core E5-2609 v3 Xeons. Each socket is flanked by eight DIMM slots and if your pockets are deep enough for 64GB LR-DIMMs, you can push capacity to an app-crunching 1TB.

Overall noise levels are surprisingly low as well. The fans do whine a bit but this won't be an issue in a rack cabinet and even when on the lab bench, we didn't find them intrusive.

The server includes full remote control and power management as standard features

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

Remote management

The CyberServe also includes an onboard ASMB8-iKVM remote management controller. Access can be shared with the first Gigabit network port or restricted to the dedicated DM port next door and you can create groups of users and administrators and determine levels of access for each one.

The simple web interface provides plenty of information about the server's operational status. The health screen displays a complete rundown on sensor readings for all critical components and you can link their thresholds to actions such as power recycles plus SNMP traps and email alerts.

Notably, KVM-over-IP and virtual media services come as standard so you can remotely control the server and use devices on the host system as virtual boot media. Tier-1 vendors such as HP, Dell and Lenovo expect you to pay for an optional upgrade to activate these features.

Conclusion

It may be small but the CyberServe punches well above its weight in the hardware rankings. Storage capacity is a weakness but you'll be hard pushed to find another solution that packs this much power in as small a chassis and for this price as well.

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

Chassis: Asus R9D 1U rack Motherboard: Asus Z10PR-D16 CPU: 2 x 1.9GHz Xeon E5-2609 v3 (6-core, 15MB L3 cache) Memory: 16GB 2,133MHz DDR4 (max 1TB using LR-DIMMs) Storage: 2 x 240GB Intel S3500 SATA SSDs RAID: Intel C612 Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5 Expansion: 2 x PCI-e Gen3 slots, Asus OCP mezzanine slot Network: 2 x Gigabit Other ports: 2 x USB 3, VGA, PS/2 Power: Fixed 500W Platinum PSU Management: Asus ASMB8-iKVM with Gigabit Warranty: 3yrs on site NBD Options: 10GbE mezzanine cards – single-port SFP+, £110; dual-port SFP+, £160; dual-port RJ-45, £180 (all ex VAT)

SMBs looking to maximise their precious rack space will like Dell's new PowerEdge R430. This 1U rack server may only be 24in. deep but it squeezes in a big hardware package that includes dual E5-2600 v3 CPUs, a high memory capacity and plenty of storage options.

Dell supplied us with the base model kitted out with four LFF drive bays serviced by the embedded PERC S130 RAID controller. Ordered at the point of sale, the R430 can be specified with up to 10 SFF drives and choice selection of PCI-Express RAID cards although, as we found, the process is far from simple.

The R430 exhibits very good internal design and whisper-quiet cooling

Dell's iDRAC8 controller provides quality server monitoring tools and handy power consumption graphs

Storage conundrums

The review system had four 1TB SATA LFF drives with each cold-swap carrier cabled directly to the motherboard's SATA port via a fan-out cable. Entry-level systems start with the embedded PERC S130 controller which supports RAID0, 1, 5 and 10 arrays in software.

Hot-swap drives are supported by the S130 but you'll need to specify this backplane during the ordering phase. A dedicated expansion slot is also provided and you can choose from the PERC H330, H730 and H730P snap-in cards which all support 12Gbps SAS drives with the latter two offering 1GB or 2GB of Flash backed cache.

It gets more complicated as the PERC cards have dual 4-port connectors so only support up to eight SAS SFF drives. The 8-bay backplane also has a cut-out to allow a low-profile optical drive to be fitted in the front panel.

Contrary to some of the images on Dell's web site, the 10-bay model only supports SATA SFF drives where the backplane takes up all available space at the front of the server. It's cabled to all four of the motherboard's embedded SATA ports and cannot be used with the optional PERC RAID cards.

Internal design

The short depth of the chassis makes good cooling design imperative and Dell has done a fine job. System cooling is handled by a bank of six cold-swap, dual rotor fans in front of the motherboard while the CPU sockets and attendant DIMM slots are covered by a removable plastic air shroud.

The smooth air flow path through the chassis means the fans don't have to work hard and we found the R430 extremely quiet. The portion of the lid over the PSU bays gets a bit warm to the touch but as long as you leave some space above the server, this won't be an issue.

Memory allotment is slightly unusual as the eight front slots are assigned to the first CPU socket while the second socket gets four slots. The main advantage here is you can cut costs by specifying a single CPU and still upgrade to 256GB of memory.

The free OpenManage Essentials app provides network system monitoring and alerting tools

Deployment and power

Dell's embedded LifeCycle Controller makes light work of OS deployment as we used it to install Windows Server 2012 R2 with all the right drivers inside 30 minutes. It provides firmware upgrades tools, hardware diagnostics and facilities for configuring remote access and storage.

Dell's iDRAC8 provides a wealth of remote management features. Along with power controls, we could monitor graphs of power consumption and temperatures but if you want full remote control, you'll must upgrade to the Enterprise version - we've included this in the price shown.

The server was supplied with dual 1.6GHz E5-2603 Xeons and redundant 550W Platinum PSUs which proved to be easy on the power supply. With the OS in idle we measured a draw of 85W which peaked at only 132W with the CPUs under extreme load from the SiSoft Sandra benchmarking app.

Dell's OMM iOS app allowed us to keep a close eye on the server from our iPad

Server management

Dell OpenManage Server Administrator provides local and remote web-based management for the server it's installed on. The free OpenManage Essentials goes further by extending centralised management and alerting to all your SNMP and WMI enabled systems.

We were pleased to see Dell has updated its OpenManage Mobile (OMM) app with improved iOS support. We had problems with it when we reviewed the R730 as it refused to talk to the server's iDRAC controller.

OMM version 1.0.2 resolves these issues but after updating our app, we still couldn't connect to the R430's iDRAC. We discussed this Dell and the workaround was to remove the app and do a fresh install from the App Store.

With this fixed, we could view the server's vital signs from the OMM app on our iPad which listed details of installed CPUs and memory plus the OS version. Hardware logs are provided for system events and the LifeCycle controller, we could check on the firmware versions for all hardware components and view a server health status page.

Conclusions

Dell's confusing web site ordering processes and user manual make choosing the right storage options more complicated than necessary but there's no doubting the R430's credentials. Its compact chassis teams up a powerful specification with good expansion potential and all at a price that will appeal to enterprises and SMBs alike.

Verdict

Once you’ve worked out which storage option you want, the PowerEdge R430 is an ideal choice where server rack space is at a premium. It packs a lot of processing power into its compact chassis and delivers it at a very competitive price

Chassis: 1U rack CPU: 2 x 1.6GHz Xeon E5-2603 v3 Memory: 48GB 1,600MHz DDR4 (max 384GB) Storage: 4 x 1TB Dell 7.2K SATA hard disks (max 10) RAID: Dell PERC S130 Array support: Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5 Network: 4 x Gigabit Expansion: 2 x PCI-Express 3.0 slots Power: 2 x 550W Platinum hot-swap PSUs Management: Dell iDRAC8 with Enterprise upgrade Warranty: 3yrs on-site NBD

The DL360p Gen8 1U rack server delivers support for Intel's E5-2600 Xeons and targets businesses looking for a rack dense package which can handle high demand workloads.

The launch of the Gen8 ProLiants represents the culmination of Project Voyager HP's mission to automate the entire lifecycle of its servers. HP boldly claims it can reduce long term power consumption, drastically cut the time to resolve problems and slash operational costs across the board.

A key feature of the Gen8 ProLiants is they all show off HP's new iLO4 chip. This provides the foundation for all server management and comes as standard with HP's Agentless Management, Active Health System (AHS) and Embedded Remote Support features.

Server monitoring gets even more sophisticated as HP's Sea of Sensors goes 3D. This feature was originally introduced in the seventh generation ProLiants and HP has added 28 thermal sensors throughout the server and its own PCI-e and mezzanine cards.

These sensor allow the iLO4 to keep a close eye on temperatures across the entire system and identify any hot-spots. It's surprising how much power cooling fans can suck up and the iLO4 aims to cut energy costs by firing up them up as and when required.

OS installation gets a whole lot easier with HP's new Intelligent Provisioning feature

Intelligent Provisioning

The AHS monitors the server and stores up to 1GB of diagnostics data which can be securely downloaded to HP support for faster problem resolution. It links up with HP's new SmartMemory and SmartDrive devices and if it identifies a problem or impending failure, arranges for replacement memory and hard drives to be ordered in advance.

A new feature we were pleased to see was Intelligent Provisioning. This makes it possible to load an OS on an HP server without having to boot it first from the SmartStart DVD; something which is long-overdue. Accessed from the startup menu, it makes deployment much easier although it's worth noting Dell introduced a similar feature over three years ago in its PowerEdge R610.

Storage capacity has been improved over the G7 model as you have four LFF, eight SFF or ten SFF drive bay options. The disk carriers show off HP's SmartDrive feature as they are packed with status LEDs. A locate LED on each carrier glows blue whilst the drive is being identified by the host and flashes when it's being updated.

HP's new SmartDrive carriers and integral LEDs provide plenty of visual cues to hard disk operations

Storage features

The circular button has a rotating green disk activity ring whilst its multicolour centre LED shows the drive status and warns of impending failures. An LED on the carrier release button glows white to warn users it must not be removed where, for example, another drive in the same RAID-5 array has already failed.

The embedded Smart Array P420i RAID controller links up directly to the motherboard's SAS 2 ports and provides plenty of RAID and cache options. Our system had the full 2GB FBWC (flash backed write cache) module.

This does away with the need for a battery pack as it uses a small capacitor. It can fully charge itself in around five minutes and provides up to 80 seconds of power enough time to write the DDR cache contents to flash memory in the event of a power failure.

HP's Sea of Sensors 3D provides a remarkable amount of information about the server's status

Smart Guides and FlexLOMs

HP has worked on thermal design so it could get rid of the big air shroud in the G7 to improve access. It works well as even with eight fans in residence, we found the server to be extremely quiet.

Further back you have the two CPU sockets which feature HP's new Smart Socket guides. These are designed to reduce the risk of motherboard pin damage during upgrades or maintenance.

The CPUs are flanked by 24 DIMM slots and the full 768GB capacity can be realised in dual CPU systems using 1066MHz LR-DIMMs. Up to 256GB of 1600MHz RDIMM memory is supported or you can go up to 384GB of HP's high performance 1333MHz HDIMM memory.

HP's tool-free design means all components are easy to access and remove. The server has a riser at the back with X8 and X16 PCI-e Gen3 slots and the whole thing can be removed with just a flick of the wrist.

The iLO4 Power Metering feature keeps you posted on consumption but is an optional upgrade

Networking has been redesigned as the four embedded Gigabit ports on the DL360 G7 have been removed from the motherboard. In their place is a FlexLOM connector which accepts a variety of cards. We had the quad-Gigabit version but HP also offers a dual 10GbE version with 40GbE and Infiniband options on the way.

The review system came with a pair of 460W hot-plug power supplies and HP also offers 750W and 1200W options for heavier workloads. The server was supplied with dual 2GHz E5-2650 8-core Xeons and we found power consumption to be commendably low. With Windows Server 2008 R2 in idle we measured a draw of 92W. With the SiSoft Sandra benchmarking app pushing all 32 logical cores to maximum load we saw this rise to only 220W.

We could see and hear the iLO4 in action during testing as it regularly adjusted the fan speeds when the processors were under heavy load.

Overall

HP has pulled out all the stops with the DL360p Gen8 as it delivers a remarkable range innovative features. Design and build quality don't get any better and administrators will approve of the automated management and monitoring capabilities of the new iLO4 controller.

For these reasons we have no hesitation in giving the HP DL360p Gen8 an Editor's Choice award.

Verdict

The ProLiant DL360p Gen8 is well designed and packs a high-end specification into its compact 1U rack chassis. Storage potential is great as there is plenty of room to grow and HP’s new iLO4 controller cannot be beaten when it comes to management and monitoring features.

Chassis: 1U rack CPU: 2 x 2GHz Xeon E5-2650 Memory: 32GB 1600MHz DDR3 RDIMM expandable to 256GB (768GB with LR-DIMMs) Storage: 2 x 600GB HP 10k SAS hot-swap hard disks RAID: HP embedded Smart Array P420i SAS 2 with 2GB FBWC and capacitor Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 50, 6, 60 Expansion: 2 x PCI-e Gen3 slots Network: 4 x Gigabit FlexLOM Other: Internal USB port and SD card slot Power: 2 x 460W hot-plug supplies Management: HP iLO4 Standard with 10/100 Software: HP Insight Control software Warranty: 3yrs on site NBD

The latest version of Microsoft's data platform, SQL Server, brings enhanced scalability and flexibility, the company claimed today as it released the software to manufacturing.

SQL Server 2012 will also help customers manage and analyse more data than ever before, according to Microsoft.

"Data is being generated faster than ever before, and organisations need a way to process and analyse all that data," said Ted Kummert, corporate vice president at Microsoft.

"Whatever the type or size of data, SQL Server 2012 delivers the platform and familiar tools to manage data, generate actionable insights and help drive business impact."

With SQL Server 2012 and integrated business intelligence tools, we're processing massive volumes of data queries in near-real time.

Those tools include PowerPivot for Excel 2010 and Power View, and Microsoft said that by the end of June they will also include an Apache Hadoop-based service for Windows Azure.

Early users of SQL Server 2012 said that the software has lived up to its promise.

"Our business depends on delivering customers fast, detailed insight into hundreds of terabytes of social-network data," said David Mariani, vice president of engineering at influence measurement specialist Klout.

"With SQL Server 2012 and integrated business intelligence tools, we're processing massive volumes of data queries in near-real time."

"SQL Server 2012 Enterprise with AlwaysOn gives us exactly the performance we need," added Thomas Pullen, database administrator at BETONSOFT.

"We can sustain 1,500 game rounds per second that gives our players a much faster, better gaming experience."

Microsoft said that next month it would introduce new data warehousing solutions that build on SQL Server 2012.

These include a major software update and new half-rack form factors for Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse appliances, as well as availability of SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse reference architectures for SQL Server 2012.

Partners have already begun announcing support for SQL Server 2012. One of the first was EMC, which said it had optimised its storage hardware and software to work with the new Microsoft platform.

It claimed that combining SQL Server 2012 with its unified storage, storage tiering and flash caching capabilities could quadruple database performance and yield 80 per cent faster server provisioning.

Iceotope today announced a new technique of cooling servers, which it claims can make fans redundant and cooling costs non-existent.

The launch happened at this year's CeBIT conference in Hanover, Germany, with the company also saying the solution cuts 75 per cent of the mechanical costs associated with cooling servers.

Cost savings on the maintaining side might be plentiful, but the set-up price is no drop in the ocean

The product uses 3M's Novec liquid as a coolant, which Peter Hopton, founder and chief technology officer (CTO) of Iceotope, called the "environmentally friendly little brother" of Fluoroinert 3M's previous coolant incarnation.

A water jacket containing Novec wraps around components and travels through the servers in fast currents at a rate of centimetres per second. With its low surface tension, the coolant "gets into all the cracks" to absorb the heat from servers and take it away to heat exchanges, where the liquid can either be cooled or used to heat other buildings and water within the complex.

The technology can not be incorporated into existing servers, however, and businesses would have to buy new servers or modules as Iceotope refers to them to install the technology.

Cost savings on the maintaining side might be plentiful, but the set-up price is no drop in the ocean.

Customers can buy cabinets, featuring six server modules which look like blades as well as the pump and heat exchanges, for 19,995. However, the cabinets can house up to 48 modules, which start at 3,995 for fully configured servers containing two six core Xeon E5 processors, 64GB RAM, 40Gb Infiniband and SSD storage. Users are able to choose between AMD and Intel processors.

Hopton told IT Pro the technology could soon roll-out across the data centre, with products for switches, routers and GPUs in the pipeline. He defended the upfront prices though, saying the overall benefits would save a lot more money in the long term.

"No chiller equipment is needed so when you are kitting out a new data centre, you don't need to buy it," he said.

"It is not massively expensive and if you need new servers it is cost effective when you start to look at the money saved on energy consumption."

Although he couldn't confirm any UK customers yet, Hopton did say it was being implemented within UK data centres and the test company would be revealed soon.

AMD has purchased cloud micro-server manufacturer Sea Micro for $334 million (211 million) in an attempt to find its place int he ever-booming cloud market.

The chip manufacturer has always come second in the server space against major rival Intel, but hopes the new addition to its portfolio will bolster its position and get more AMD chips into cloud environments.

AMD specifically wants to help companies with web content, social networking, search and video workloads and aims to reduce complexity within the data centre, lower cost and energy consumption and increase performance.

By acquiring SeaMicro, we are accelerating AMD's transformation into an agile, disruptive innovator.

"By acquiring SeaMicro, we are accelerating AMD's transformation into an agile, disruptive innovator capable of staking a data centre leadership position," said Rory Read, president and chief executive (CEO) of AMD.

"The unmatched combination of AMD's processing capabilities, SeaMicro's system and fabric technology, and our ambidextrous technology approach uniquely positions AMD with a compelling, differentiated position to attack the fastest growing section of the server market."

SeaMicro claims its servers use only 25 percent of the power of traditional servers, whilst only taking up one sixth of the room in a data centre. It also touts 12 times the bandwidth per core.

Andrew Feldman, CEO of SeaMicro CEO, added: "SeaMicro was founded to dramatically reduce the power consumed by servers, while increasing compute density and bandwidth."

"By becoming a part of AMD, we will have access to new markets, resources, technology, and scale that will provide us with the opportunity to work tightly with our OEM partners as we fundamentally change the server market."

Feldman will become general manager a new Data Centre Server Solutions company at AMD to incorporate his firm's technology.

Dell moved into systems management when it acquired Kace in 2010 and now provides a family of three appliances, each offering a variety of functions. The K1000 reviewed here is targeted at businesses with over 100 staff and focuses on hardware and software inventory, license compliance, software distribution, service desk facilities and patch management.

The Kace K1000 is designed to provide an out-of-the box management solution and comes supplied as a good-quality PowerEdge R610 1U rack server. Deployment in the lab was straightforward, and we started at the local console to provide the appliance with a fixed IP address.

Next, we moved over to the well-designed web interface and got things rolling with a quick network IP scan. This provides a list of all discovered systems, and shows whether they are contactable and have SNMP services installed.

The Dell Kace's agentless inventory feature can discover and catalogue all nodes on a network in real time, but we found this doesn't provide any worthwhile information. Without SNMP, all it will show is open ports, whereas SNMP also shows details about the CPUs, system name and network interface traffic statistics.

A quick network scan locates all your devices, but an agent must be deployed to get any meaningful inventory data.

An agent will need to be installed for full system information and inventory. This can be run manually on selected IP addresses, or the advanced provisioning option can be used to push the agent to all systems in an IP address range.

We had no problems deploying the agent to our Windows XP, Vista, 7, Server 2003 and Server 2008 R2 systems. With this in place, inventory becomes very detailed with extensive lists of hardware information, running processes, installed software and services.

Once the agent has synced itself with the appliance, it appears in the Computers' list with an icon to show whether it's online. Selecting one then drills down to display an impressive amount of searchable information about each system.

The agent gathers hardware inventory for each system and provides a lot of useful and very detailed information.

Another useful feature of the K1000 is its Smart Labels. These can be used to represent anything from physical locations, user groups, workstations, domain members, licenses, inventory details and much more.

Smart Labels are created using the search and filter tools and up to four search parameters can be defined from the web interface. For computers, these can be anything from a CPU and memory configuration, to a BIOS and OS version, or even a disk capacity.

They have dynamic content too, so as systems change, the Label content is updated accordingly. Custom SQL queries (or Dell's assistance) will be required if more than four search parameters are required though.

Scripts and alerts can also be linked to Smart Labels. That means if a system is running low on disk space, for example, an email alert can be generated and a defrag task can be activated remotely.

License metering relies on Smart Labels too, and we found this awkward to set up on our first attempt. The process begins by creating a software Smart Label for the application or suite to be monitored, followed by the creation of a software asset that contains details about the number of licenses, when they were purchased and when they'll expire. Lastly, a license asset is created that links the Smart Label and the software asset.

Licences can be monitored from the Kace 1000 interface's Summary page, which shows a colour-coded chart for at-a-glance expiry information. Charts for the spread of OSes, online systems and security alerts are also shown here, but it's about time Dell turned these into widgets so that the view can be customised.

A summary dashboard shows the status of agents and license metering, but the layout can't be customised.

Dell also provides a heap of predefined reports and custom ones can also be created. The latter is wizard driven, where a topic is selected from a wide range and rules added accordingly. SQL query statements can also be used to further interrogate the appliance for more detailed reports.

Dell provides plenty of predefined reporting tools for interrogating the inventory.

The Service Desk feature adds a lot of value to the Kace 1000, as it allows users to submit trouble tickets via email or the Service Centre web portal.

Administrators can view all tickets, see their status, assign them to users and change their priorities. Once a user has raised a support ticket, it can then be assigned to specific support staff or groups and automatic escalation rules can be applied.

One feature conspicuous by its absence is Kace's Kontainers, which presented virtual applications to clients that could be run safely in an isolated environment. Dell told us that Kontainers are no longer supported for new customers and that it plans to replace them with a third party solution.

Dell partners with Lumension for patch management and employs its PatchLink service. SLAs exist between the two companies to ensure that Lumension tests and verifies all patches before they are pushed to the appliance.

Patching is only fully supported on Windows and OS X, and patches can be downloaded to the appliance from Lumension at scheduled intervals. Critical patch application can be fully automated and a remote replication share can be used to store patches elsewhere, so systems don't have to keep going to the appliance for them.

Software packages can be uploaded to the appliance and distributed to selected systems at scheduled times.

We rate the K1000 appliance highly for ease of fuse, since it is a lot simpler to deploy than the bloatware from LANDesk and Altiris. Some functions, like license metering, take a while to get to grips with, but Dell's Smart Labels are a powerful feature and the appliance is good value.

Verdict

Dell’s Kace K1000 systems management appliance provides a good range features and is comparatively easy to deploy. It’s also good value, as a lot of functions are included in the price — just bear in mind that Linux systems are poorly supported, the agentless inventory is of little use and the Kontainer application virtualisation feature is no longer available

SPECIFICATIONS Chassis: 1U Dell PowerEdge R610 CPU: 2x 2.4GHz Xeon E5620 Memory: 6GB 1067MHz DDR3 Storage: 3x 250GB Dell SATA hot-swap hard disks RAID: Dell PERC 6/i Network: Gigabit Ethernet Management: Web browser Subscriptions: Annual maintenance/support: 20% of list price; Jumpstart training, £1,020 (all ex VAT)

In sunny Las Vegas this week, HP has been hosting its global partner conference. It marks the first time the company has brought all its partners from across the world together as HP looks to continue its comeback from the chaos of 2011.

The one announcement that stood out was the introduction of the ProLiant Gen8 Servers. As more of the features were spelled out to the gathered throngs, techies began twitching in their seats in excitement. Amongst the titillating additions were GPS to show you where a troublesome server is in the data centre, improved Sea of Sensors technology to tell you the best place for a new server to be installed and even smart socket technology to automate putting in a processor without bending any of the pins.

If you are working as an IT admin, make sure you get new skills and make yourself indispensable.

Automation is the buzz word amongst datacentre providers right now. The more manual processes you can remove, the less room for human error and the higher the likelihood of lower unplanned downtime.

This all sounds great to me, but it is the other argument vendors use when selling it to IT pros that doesn't sit right with me.

HP's Mark Potter claimed in a press conference the lessening of manual processes would allow more time for IT admins to spend on innovation, coming up with great ways to run their IT department, rather than keeping the lights on.

He isn't the first. I have heard what seems like hundreds of executives say the same thing about automation, but it is just not the case.

No matter what George Osborne comes out with next, we are still in very tough economic times. I saw more people get made redundant in 2011 than I did back in 2009 and many businesses are struggling to keep it together.

The fact is, if you have IT admins who spend their time keeping manual processes ticking over and they can be replaced by a one off payment to a technology company, you could save a lot of cash by getting rid of that employee.

It may sound harsh, but it is true. You are not going to ask them to start gazing into the future for more weird, wonderful and most likely costly ways of doing IT in the datacentre, you will give them their pink slip and write the cheque to the vendor.

If cash was readily available, then yes, maybe you wouldn't be worrying so much about making pension payments or covering holiday pay for your employee, but in an environment when the real buzzword is cuts' businesses will replace man with machine.

Yes, it will make HP and its rivals cash but, if you are working as an IT admin, make sure you get new skills and make yourself indispensable to the IT department. Don't fall victim to the misleading tales of innovation at the end of the rainbow, protect your job.

The European Commission today unveiled plans to make Europe a leading light in high-performance computing (HPC).

The EC said there had been a "relative decline in HPC use and capabilities," but it hopes that will be reversed with a doubling of investment in supercomputing.

High Performance Computing is a crucial enabler for European industry and for more jobs in Europe.

The EU plans to increase investment in the industry from 630 million to 1.2 billion and run machines that can perform 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 tasks per second, otherwise known as exascale computing.

"High Performance Computing is a crucial enabler for European industry and for more jobs in Europe," said Neelie Kroes, the EC's vice president responsible for the Digital Agenda.

"It's investments like HPC that deliver innovations improving daily life. We've got to invest smartly in this field because we cannot afford to leave it to our competitors."

The EC wants to see greater use of HPC systems and services amongst industry players and SMEs.

HPC has traditionally been reserved for larger enterprises, due to the significant cost. Supercomputers can cost as much as 100 million or more just to build.

Major manufacturers do lease out usage of their HPC machines, however. Indeed, Intel told IT Pro last year that supercomputing was going to become much more mainstream in the coming years.

The EC said it would like to see "centres of excellence" established for software in scientific fields like energy, life-sciences and climate.

Andy Grant, an HPC expert at IBM, welcomed the announcement.

"It's not just good for us but good for the European economy," he told IT Pro.

"It's good that the EU is recognising importance in HPC. It's something the UK Government has been doing as well."

As for whether HPC capabilities could reach SMEs, Grant claimed there has been a lot of effort to make HPC more SME friendly.

"We can't say for certain the barrier for entry will come down but I would advise SMEs go to cloud providers and see if they can dip their feet in HPC," he added.

More intelligent server technology will create more jobs, rather than lose IT workers their jobs, HP claimed today.

At the company's launch of its new ProLiant Gen8 server range, the focus was on automation - removing manual tasks from the datacentre and taking away complex systems sucking up most of IT administrator's working hours.

However, with less need for administration in the datacentre, some believe there could be less need for IT admins themselves.

IT admins are celebrating. They are celebrating that they don't have to spend all their time keeping their data centre running, they have time to innovate.

During a panel discussion at the launch, Richard Fichera, vice president and senior research analyst at Forrester, alluded to the issue.

"Most businesses spend much more money on planned downtime than unplanned downtime... [but] unplanned downtime is a constant headache," he said.

"[However], don't make servers too smart as people like me may well be out of a job, as well as the IT people you sell to. You have to be careful of that."

When IT Pro asked Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager of enterprise servers, storage and networking (ESSN) at HP, whether this increased automation would put IT admins out of work, he claimed it would actually create jobs.

"When it comes to IT budgets, 70 per cent of what they spend is running legacy applications," he said. "If you look at what businesses want to do, they don't want to spend 70 per cent of their IT dollars getting no new innovation, they want to spend that on innovation," Donatelli said.

"The biggest frustration facing IT [departments] today... is [they] aren't moving fast enough with [technology] innovations. So really what we have set out to do, be it with these servers or with converged infrastructure, is to allow them to spend more on innovation and less just keeping what they already have running.

"I think this is job positive and job creating, particularly if you look at the technology coming out, more jobs for innovating."

Mark Potter, senior vice president and general manager of industry standard servers (ISS) at HP, backed up his colleague and claimed IT admins were not concerned but excited about the technology.

"IT admins are celebrating," he told IT Pro. "They are celebrating that they don't have to spend all their time keeping their datacentre running, they have time to innovate. They applaud this [automation]."

For more information on the new ProLiant Gen8 server range launched by HP this week, click here.

HP today announced its latest range of ProLiant servers, hoping to cut out manual processes and free up time in the datacentre, leaving space for more innovation.

The ProLiant Gen8 portfolio was born after two years of research and development, costing the company $300 million (191 million), titled 'Project Voyager.'

The research began because HP realised servers needed to "change course" to keep up with "the era of the cloud," claimed Mark Potter, vice president and general manager of Industry Standard Servers (ISS) at HP.

We need to free up admins, take advantage of capacity and remove costly unplanned downtime.

"Manual processes cost so much time that could be used to innovate," he said, during a keynote speech at HP's first global partner conference in Las Vegas.

"They don't allow the customer to harness the stranded capacity in a datacentre and address growing energy needs. We need to free up admins, take advantage of capacity and remove costly unplanned downtime."

As a result, the main focus of the ProLiant Gen8 servers is automation. An update to HP's Sea of Sensors technology will enable admins to see the best place to put a server, considering power, cooling and redundancy circuit issues through one tool. Potter claimed the server can then be plugged in and ready to go straight away.

It also automatically provisions power to certain areas, making sure nothing is wasted, and agentless software continues to cut the need for manual processes.

Potter said these examples - which fall under the umbrella of HP's 'ProActive Insight' architecture - made "a brand new ground breaking architecture, to build servers with automation and intelligence to take care of itself; exactly what it should do in the cloud era."

Other new features of the range include a smart socket addition, reducing the risk of bending pins when putting in a processor - a common cause of failures in the datacentre.

Smart Drive technology combines with the automation functionality to give engineers better information on which drives are where, making sure they don't remove the wrong one - another common cause of breakdowns in datacentres.

HP listed a number of claims around performance, including 10 per cent less energy consumption, six times faster I/O for storage and three times productivity for admins, but companies will have to wait until March to get their hands on the new servers when they become generally available.

The ProLiant Gen8 family includes the ProLiant ML Tower - for remote or branch offices - ProLiant DL rack-mounted servers, and ProLiant BL blade servers and ProLiant SL scalable system servers - suited for cloud systems.

HP will be shipping servers based on ARM chips and Intel's Atom processors in the first half of this year.

Confirmation of the launch timescale came today from Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and gemeral manager of enterprise storage, servers and networking [ESSN] at HP.

The servers were born out of the 'Project Moonshot' research programme developed by HP and announced at the start of last November.

The servers will be a significant boost to British chip designer ARM, which has traditionally been overlooked in favour of Intel and, to a lesser extent, AMD x86 processors.

This will lead to all kinds of incredible advancements and change the market

Donatelli took to the stage at HP's first global partner event in Las Vegas today, telling 3,000 HP partners his company was proud of the "game changing" announcements it had made in the server space in the past 100 days.

"Instead of building out of x86, we are going to build servers out of ARM chips and Atom chips, those same chips from your smartphones," he said.

"This will lead to all kinds of incredible advancements and change the market."

Donatelli then confirmed the new servers would be shipping in "the first half of the calendar year."

The servers themselves will be aimed at datacentres looking to run more effectively, especially large enterprises and cloud providers.

Project Moonshot aims to help companies with large sprawls consolidate their data centres and, in turn, make them more energy efficient.

HP has not turned its back on x86-based servers, however, and today launched its latest range, the ProLiant Gen8 family. To read more about the new servers, which also claim to make data centres greener with a 10 per cent reduction in energy consumption, click here.

EMC today launched VFCache, a flash caching module for servers announced last year under the Project Lightning moniker.

It marks another foray away from the storage array for EMC as it looks to bring its flash expertise to the server space.

Testing showed a three times throughput improvement and a 60 per cent dip in latency, the storage giant claimed.

If that means bringing storage to the compute makes sense, that's what we'll do. And that's kind of what we're doing with VFCache.

"This is a product that extends EMC's FAST technology into the server. It is a combination of hardware and software, the hardware being a PCIe card, which is a very exciting technology because if really changes the performance landscape it's even faster than flash inside a storage array," Barry Ader, EMC's senior director of storage product marketing, told IT Pro.

"We marry the hardware with some software intelligence that sits inside of the server, the operating environment, to determine exactly what data is hot and make sure we keep the hottest data in the server, closer to the application, closer to the CPU complex."

Data held in the cache is still pushed out to the storage array for added security, Ader said.

"This is a very nice complement to the VMAX and VMX storage devices," he added.

"VFCache will work with a variety of servers that are out there. We've qualified this with IBM, Dell, HP and our Cisco UCS partners. We have qualified VFCache with the majority of server vendors that are out there."

VFCache will either be sold to IT departments directly via EMC to line up with the vendor's storage products, or through channel partners, including server and storage companies.

The main competition for EMC in this area will be Fusion-io, which has been pushing out PCIe cards to the industry a few years ago.

"The difference here is that they [Fusion-io] went after the early adopters," Ader asaid. "They sold these cards as DAS [direct-attached storage] cards rather than cache devices. So that caused a lot of problems for their customers.

"Really mainstream customers weren't able to leverage this it didn't solve their scalability, shareability protection problems."

VFCache will also be getting deduplication technology added to it in the coming months.

Thunder coming

EMC also revealed plans for an entirely separate appliance, which will essentially do the same job as VFCache but considerably quicker.

"It's for those high-end use cases. A good example might be a high-end trading application... it might not be for the mainstream."

The first Thunder devices will be trialled with early adopters in the second quarter. Wider adoption will be opened up later in the year

EMC in server space?

Ader would not be drawn into saying whether this foray into the server space would mark EMC's eventual move into actually manufacturing servers.

"As our customers are looking for different ways to manage their information, of course EMC is going to look at these different ways that we can leverage technology like flash disrupting types of enabling technology.

"There are ways for EMC to enhance value to customers by not just going into the server space. That's not the intention. The intention here is, there are different ways to create value. In some cases that might mean bringing storage to the server.

"If that means bringing storage to the compute makes sense, that's what we'll do. And that's kind of what we're doing with VFCache."

Companies such as Cisco and HP are trying to pack more into servers, whether with networking or storage capabilities.

Dell, meanwhile, recently broke off its storage relationship with EMC, hinting it would be dallying in smarter servers with potentially greater storage integration.

For anyone who's been watching Cisco's development over the past few years, they'll know the company went through a somewhat chaotic period in 2010 and 2011.

In a bid to galvanise investor confidence, the company distanced itself from the consumer sphere, streamlined operations and went back to focusing on the enterprise.

This translated into the death of Flip cameras and umi home videoconferencing, job losses and greater embracing of technologies tied to the network.

Three years ago, no one would have believed Cisco would play a role in the server market.

We caught up with Laurent Blanchard, the networking giant's vice president of enterprise, at this year's Cisco Live event to ask why IT departments should get excited about Cisco again.

Cisco is still fairly new to the server space, having only entered the market with UCS (Unified Computing and Servers) a few years back. What can you say to IT departments to convince them Cisco is a worthy contender in this industry?

I'm not here to convince you if you are not ready to be convinced but I'm going to give my point of view.

Three years ago, no one would have believed Cisco would play a role in the server market. Actually, what we did was apply our knowledge of driving a huge amount of data through something the network into a server. We redesigned a server from scratch. When you have a legacy of many years, it is very difficult to do this. But the structure of the UCS is new from the design perspective.

In two years, we have just signed the 10,000th UCS customer. Who would have though that we would do that three years ago?

We can differentiate ourselves and the market is actually accepting it very well.

What about bringing in more storage capabilities? Is that something Cisco will do in the future rather than just partnering?

When you look at what is happening, people are moving to the cloud and we've found that there are three levels of services for infrastructure that have to be provided: compute, storage and network.

We believe we have a very strong knowledge of servers, we have 25 years+ in the network and today we believe in storage we are better off partnering with very big companies such as EMC.

We work with NetApp and we work with others as well. We have building blocks together with NetApp in the same way we have with EMC. You can say one is larger than the other one but our approach in the cloud is to drive and to work in an ecosystem.

I think the industry is understanding that the previous way of looking at IT has changed. Now the three elements are extremely integrated and you need to have a huge amount of knowledge in intelligent networks, you have to understand very well how you can virtualise in the server and therefore have the storage as capacity for those two other elements.

It is normal that the industry is going in this direction. Three years ago nobody would have believed it. I think Dell is looking at it as well, like HP, like the others.

With companies coming together in clusters to provide services, what would you say to those worried about vendor lock-in, or siloed IT architectures?

This is not what people have on their minds. First of all, a CIO of a very large organisation, they have an environment with many providers, many suppliers. They may have HP servers and Brocade solution, they don't have only one provider.

The industry is understanding that the previous way of looking at IT has changed.

Our value is that we know how to get all these pieces together and working extremely well.

There was a lot of talk about innovation during the Cisco Live keynote. Can you convince IT departments that you really are innovating when so many smaller players are making big strides?

Our key differentiator is that we know how to manage huge volumes of data transfer in an intelligent manner, in a secure manner.

If you look at the cloud, in 2010 people were saying there is roughly $30 billion investment being made into the cloud. By 2014, it will be at $100 billion and 50 per cent of the compute consumed will be cloud based.

Now if you agree with this, and if you agree with the fact that the volume of data is going to explode, and if you agree the security issue is going to be important you need to have the right network. This is where you put the most intelligence.

The innovation is to continue investing into development of the network and to answer major trends like bring your own device (BYOD), the internet of things, smart grid. Smart grid is huge business. We apply our innovation into the energy market, the smart grid.

We can make video data intelligent. You can do a search on videos now, for example. So you can search for what someone said or for keywords.

Going back to cloud, how much traction have you got within service provider data centres?

We do work with the traditional service providers, like Amazon and Google.

A lot of the talk at Cisco Live has been around providing better than 'good enough' networks, rather than premium ones like Cisco claims to offer. But a lot of IT managers are happy with good enough as long as it has got a low barrier of entry. Do you worry some of the cheaper providers are going to steal business away from you in the current climate?

I think the trend from the IT and CIO/IT manager side, the big one, is the move from Capex to Opex. When you look at the cost of running an operation, most of the cost is not the initial investment, it's running it.

You can go and buy a very cheap server with no security built into it, but it is going to cost you a lot of money after that.

But then you have the business angle which is continuously pushing you to get a new environment, new devices to be supported. Actually, what you're looking at is elasticity and agility at a cost which is the lowest cost.

We're clearly looking at the total cost of ownership (TCO), the cost of running the operation, as well as doing no compromise on security.

You can go and buy a very cheap server with no security built into it, but it is going to cost you a lot of money after that. Security is an environment where we feel there is no compromise and today it is one of the top asks of the CIO.

Can you prove that your TCO is lower than others?

We have very large companies who've done this. Let's take banking firm ING, they moved into a solution using UCS for virtualisation and they've been consolidating many servers they have IBM, HP, Dell servers. They have been consolidating using Cisco technology UCS with a VMware hypervisor and EMC. The cost of what they are running is lower than what they had before.

I don't like overall studies covering this because each environment is different, but I can tell you we would not have gotten to 10,000 customers if the competition was cheaper.

I've been at HP where I sold x86 and you would sell it, sell it, sell it. But if you don't have any differentiators, you are under an additional pressure margin. This is not where we want to play.

Just over a year ago, Michael Dell didn't have the full confidence of his company's shareholders.

A quarter of them withheld voting for the founder's re-election, as Mr Dell received less support than any other executive re-elected to the board.

The central issue facing the chairman and CEO was over a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigation into how Mr Dell and his firm failed to adequately disclose information to shareholders over payments from Intel. The chip maker effectively paid Dell to keep using its processors, rather than switch to AMD.

The payments from Intel made it seem as though Dell was meeting or surpassing results expectations, the SEC said. Without them, however, the company would not have done so once between May 2001 and January 2006, the regulatory body claimed.

Dell was told to pay $100 million as part of the settlement, whilst the company founder personally paid out $4 million. It was not a pretty end to a murky story.

The legal investigation was not Dell's only problem. Some were calling for fresh blood, for a chief who could take Dell into a new era of IT in the cloud and thinner clients, as the desktop market falls.

This all came just after three years of Michael Dell's return as CEO of the company he founded, having stepped down in 2004.

Like a nerdy kid hitting the gym in earnest, Dell has bulked up to become a full data centre solution company.

He has made some bold attempts to answer questions surrounding his ability to take Dell forward over the last year, however. He has re-envisioned his company, whilst keeping a firm grip on the client market, as others namely HP have chosen to move away.

Has the company-coined "new Dell" brought him back from the brink and secured his place as the leader of the business he created?

Welcome back

From the outside, it appears so. Dell has been a confident company of late.

Back in February, it posted some solid results, as its fourth quarter smashed Wall Street expectations. Many pointed to a Dell revival, as the company shifted into higher margin business, including a greater focus on servers, storage and services.

In August, the company again posted some decent figures as net income went up 63 per cent year-over-year. However, it reduced its revenue expectations for the year down to between one and five per cent. Yet it would be harsh to slam Dell for this mixed showing, given the entire market is being hit by reduced demand, added to the fact it is going through a major transitional period. We can forgive this faltering for now.

Highlighting its commitment to change, Dell has spent a penny or two. As part of its redefining of its business to focus on overall solutions, moving away from a hardware-centric model, Dell has bought a raft of companies.

The acquisition of Perot Systems for around $3.9 billion kicked off the spending spree in 2009, marking a notable moment in Dell's services commitment. Then came KACE Systems in 2010, providing hardware-based systems management appliances, followed by storage company Compellent, having missed out on 3PAR. Its latest move was to get hold of Force10 Networks to provide some prowess in the networking space. Like a nerdy kid hitting the gym in earnest, Dell has bulked up to become a full data centre solution company.

"Finally, some of the power brokers in Dell have accepted that pile them high, sell them cheap' has had its day, and the acquisitions Dell has been making are all aimed at moving it into a much more complex, full hardware stack sell, with the software coming from solid relationships, mainly with Microsoft, but also on the Linux side as well," said Clive Longbottom, founder of analyst firm Quocirca.

"I do believe he has now seen that Dell could not go on as it was. New blood has been brought in, new approaches are being brought to the fore, and Dell is looking stronger than it has done for a while."

Lingering issues

On the face of it, Mr Dell has helped create a new company ready for today's IT world. Yet significant stumbling blocks remain. Number one is the declining PC market and Dell's falling position within it.

During its inaugural Dell World conference in Austin last week, Lenovo became the number two PC seller, pushing the US firm down into third place. Given the PC industry is already in decline, the Texan firm will not want to fall from the upper echelons of the market.

Exacerbating things is Dell's performance in other client segments. In tablets, one of the causes of the PC market's contraction, Dell has failed to impress. Its lineup of Streak devices have performed poorly, with the Streak 5 model ditched earlier this year. It has plans for a global release of 10-inch consumer-focused tablets, but they have not emerged in the West yet.

Dell hasn't made much of a mark on the smartphone space either. Despite producing a quality phone with the Dell Venue Pro, its market share remains infinitesimal. According to Gartner, its not even in the top 10.

Michael Dell may have to face up to the reality it shouldn't bet on the consumer segment as much as it currently is. Cisco has proven how disastrous major gambles in the consumer sphere can be, especially if you don't have the relevant acumen or experience.

By turning his ship towards a cloudy horizon and building hardware for the entire stack, Dell is looking like a considerably more attractive proposition.

In tablets, Dell will have to create something with top-level design quality and some significant power, as well as a low-entry price point if it wants to have any chance at succeeding. Whilst it can certainly create quality hardware, offering low costs looks unlikely. For starters, it won't be able to rely on apps and software sales like Amazon can.

Furthermore, no matter how much Dell says smartphones are part of the end-to-end solution for businesses, it can't deny the devices are primarily targeted at consumers. When you think of smartphones though, you do not think of Dell.

Simply looking at the most recent results, which showed much of the positives were coming from the enterprise segment, it should be clear to Michael Dell that placing considerable emphasis on the consumer is a big risk.

Let's get positive

Yet Mr Dell has done well. By turning his ship towards a cloudy horizon and building hardware for the entire stack, Dell is looking like a considerably more attractive proposition for companies who want a full business package.

"As long as Dell retains focus and manages to keep fighting with its broadened arsenal of compute, storage, management, network hardware, brought through with professional services and being sold as a solution sell, rather than a portfolio sell, I believe that it will begin to take business away from a wounded HP, and could also chip away at IBM where some organisations see IBM as being too expensive and cumbersome to deal with," Longbottom told IT Pro.

Michael Dell's second reign as CEO won't be of Steve Jobs proportions. He will not turn Dell into a cult-inspiring, behemoth of a tech provider, but there is little doubt he has steered the business in the right direction. All he has to do now is keep firmly on course hopefully steering away from consumer clients - amidst turbulent seas.

As IT spending looks set to diminish over the next year, Dell will have to look to those markets it knows will provide it with solid income.

Advances in data collection and information management over the last two decades have encouraged businesses to create ever larger databases, to store an ever increasing number of records.

With the cost of servers and storage falling, in real terms, the cost of doing so on a per record basis is lower than ever. In 1981, the cost of 1GB of storage was $300,000 (185,000) whilst today, it is estimated to be just 10 cents, according to US-based researcher David Isenberg.

Advances in sensor, instrument and even point of sale technology have made it much easier to collect raw data, often in real time. Even a humble shop till or traffic light contains sensors that can gather thousands of data points in an hour.

To a large extent, the growth in data collection has outpaced the tools available for businesses to manage or analyse it and a common theme in conversations about data analytics with CIOs at least is businesses have more data than they quite know what to do with. That data is only a useful asset to the business, rather than a source of cost, if it can be turned into information and, hopefully, insight.

Of course, one answer is to invest more in data mining, business intelligence, knowledge management and predictive analytics. Technologies such as in-memory databases have also sped up business' ability to sift through their data stores for that nugget of useful information.

But the problem is by no means just a technological one. When quizzed, CIOs often admit the business collects data because it can perhaps as a result of newer technologies such as RFID but they do not always consider how they will use it.

This is part of the thinking behind an initiative by IBM to provide boot camps for developers and other IT professionals tasked with making sense of those growing volumes of information.

Increasingly, the large IT vendors and consultancies are turning their attention to the notion of "big data." This embraces not only data storage and management but also ideas such as real time data analytics including stream computing, another IBM initiative and natural language queries.

Businesses are also becoming more concerned with how to catalogue and analyse unstructured data, such as Office documents or audio and video, alongside conventional database entries.

But perhaps the bigger question is whether companies need to gather quite so much information in the first place. The more data a company holds, the more sophisticated the tools they will need to process it, and the more likely they are to breach data protection or other rules.

A sound information strategy should come first, with technology, tools and training to support it.

Stephen Pritchard is a contributing editor at IT PRO.

Comments? Questions? You can email him here

Data centres are often short on space which forces server manufactures to be ever more innovative in the quest for higher compute node densities. With the CyberServe X34-Q104 Broadberry has managed the remarkable feat of squeezing four independent servers into a low profile 1U rack chassis.

The X34-Q104 is based on Intel's latest Server System SR1640TH platform, provocatively codenamed Thunder Hill. The system shows some lateral thinking by Intel as up until now its rack server products have been functional, but basic and uninspiring in the design department.

The four server nodes consist of two separate motherboards each fitted in independently powered trays. Each motherboard has two processor sockets each filled with a 2.4GHz Xeon 3430 processor. There are thus four processors in total, with each one designed to appear as a completely separate server.

The chassis itself functions purely as a shell for the two trays. The only components inside it are two 450W cold-swap power supplies which the trays mate with when inserted from the front.

Tray design is impressively tidy as all components are neatly laid out down the length of the tray with hardly a wire or cable out of place to mar their perfect symmetry. The front part of the tray is used to house two hard disks and even here Intel has reduced cabling requirements by placing the SATA and power interfaces up at the front.

Broadberry offers a good choice of storage options and supplied the left hand tray with a pair of 500GB Seagate Barracuda SATA drives and the right hand tray with two 80GB Intel SSDs. The price for the review system includes all of these drives although Broadberry advised us it could supply the system with four 80GB SSDs for 2,550 or four 500GB SATA drives for 2,180.

The one feature we didn't like was the basic Matrox G200 video chip on each node. These only have 32MB of video memory and support a cramped maximum resolution of 1024 x 768 which is a real pain for local management.

From the appearance of the motherboards you wouldn't guess they were two independent nodes, but a glance at the back gives the game away. The rear panel for each tray has a complete set of ports, comprising monitor, dual Gigabit Ethernet, dual USB2 and remote management sockets, for each node.

The tray's front panel has power and ID buttons for each node, along with LEDs for network activity and warnings, plus two more USB ports. We found having four USB ports per node really useful as we could leave the keyboard and mouse plugged in even if we wanted to use a USB flash drive or other such storage device.

Each tray has its own 450W cold-swap power supply. When you remove a tray the supply stays put, but if you need to replace it, the unit can easily be withdrawn from the rear.

The server also has power frugality as a key focus and our power tests confirmed what a miser it is. As we brought each node online we took measurements with them running in idle and with SiSoft Sandra pushing all cores on each one to near maximum utilisation.

The X34-Q104 is remarkably quiet as each tray has three dual-rotor cold-swap fans at the front. During normal operations this server is quiet enough to sit on a desk. The fans did increase speed when we ran the SiSoft load test, but this was only briefly and even then noise levels weren't a concern.

Each node has an integrated BMC (baseboard management controller) and the bundled Intel Active System Console provides basic local server monitoring. We recommend adding the optional RMM3 Lite-V modules to each node as these activate web browser-based monitoring which provides full access to power controls, plus extensive views of all sensor data.

Remote management features aren't as good as those you'll find on HP's embedded iLO3 as you can't monitor, control or cap overall power consumption as you can with ProLiant servers. However, unlike HP you get KVM-over-IP remote control as standard, and not as a chargeable upgrade, which also allows you to define virtual floppy and optical media for the node to use.

The CyberServe X34-Q104 is one of the best designed and most well-built systems we've yet seen from Intel's Server Systems family and is well suited to a wide range of tasks including hosting and web server farms. Space constrained data centres looking to do more with available space will find its low power consumption appealing and it's also very good value with each node in the review costing only 600 each.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

Broadberry proves that four can go into one as the X34-Q104 delivers a high-density compute node package at a very low price. RAID is not an option for each server node, but the system is otherwise well designed and power consumption for all four nodes is impressively low.

Chassis: 1U rack Power: 2 x 450W cold-swap power supplies Compute Nodes: four, each with the following specification: CPU: 2.4GHz Intel Xeon X3430 Memory: 4GB 1,333MHz ECC DDR3 expandable to 32GB Storage: 80GB Intel SSD or 500GB Seagate Barracuda SATA hard disk Controller: Embedded Intel SATA controller RAID: None Network: 2 x Gigabit Ethernet Ports: 4 x USB2 Software: Intel Server Deployment Toolkit Options: Intel RMM3 Lite-V module, £35 per node

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has announced a new storage platform, along with new software, to increase its presence in the virtualisation market.

The Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) introduces the company's new 3D scaling technology, which it claims can "dynamically scale up, scale out and scale deep" to help customers deal with the current data explosion, whilst using a multi-vendor data centre environment.

Using 2.5in SAS hard disks, it has a very high density and offers page-level automated tiering to organise data into the suitable tiers.

HDS claimed the VSP uses 30 per cent less power consumption for capacity when compared to its rivals and reduces total cost of ownership by 33 per cent in the first year.

Hu Yoshida, chief technology officer and vice president at HDS, claimed the VSP was built for virtualised server environments, adding: "With unique 3D scaling and management, customers can deliver capacity and computing resources as quickly as virtual servers are created," he said.

To compliment the VSP, HDS has also launched Hitachi Command Suite management software to help users control their virtual environments. Coupled together, it claimed the VSP and software set new benchmarks for the virtualised world.

"Under conditions of shrinking budgets, organisational change and increased competition, enterprises are being challenged to make information both available and secure while their IT organisations are asked to do more with less," said Jack Domme, chief executive (CEO) of HDS.

"We are solving the industry's most pressing challenges with our approach of one platform for all data, coupled with our leadership in virtualisation technology."

Oracle has revealed upgraded hardware and added support for Amazon cloud services at its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco this week.

The company's new co-chief executive (co-CEO), Mark Hurd, took to the stage to detail upgraded Exadata data processing appliances on the day HP dropped its court case against him.

The Database Machine X2-8 and X2-2 follow on from previous releases, but add higher processing speeds and larger-capacity storage. The X2-8 is supplied as a full rack only and the X2-2 comes in a choice of configurations, scaling from a quarter rack to a 42-unit full rack.

Hurd said about data warehousing: "The data volumes now are huge and they're going to keep getting bigger. As they grow rapidly you're going to need more and more power. [You'll need] beefier processors in the database to handle yet more users: two Intel eight-processor servers, which means you have 128 cores in this eight processor system."

The Exadata Database Machine X2-8 is aimed at very large OLTP and Data Warehousing applications and comprises two eight-socket database servers. The X2-2, an update to the former V2, has eight two-socket database servers. Both systems also include 14 Oracle Exadata Storage Servers with InfiniBand switches.

The Exadata Servers have 168 cores with up to 336TB capacity and Smart Flash Cache can hold up to 5TB of frequently accessed data to improve transaction response times with high throughput.

Oracle also announced a deal with Amazon to allow Oracle customers to fully deploy their software on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. Previously, the company had suggested customers should use EC2 for development and testing instances only.

Oracle said it would support and certify its database, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, Siebel CRM, Fusion Middleware, and its Linux distribution on Amazon. The proviso is the software should be wrapped as Oracle VM virtualised instances rather than EC2's. Oracle will not charge for moving licenses across.

Deployments to EC2 will be enabled using Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). The Oracle-specific AMIs will cover the database, Linux, E-Business Suite and Fusion Middleware.

This fits well with the announcement on Sunday of the Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle's modularised internal cloud hardware. Customers can deploy to Exalogic and move suitable facilities to EC2.

Tandberg Data has unveiled three new products to help small and medium businesses (SMBs) protect their critical information.

The AccuVault series is designed with several pre-configured features, enabling businesses without the IT expertise in house to quickly deploy the systems.

"While small and medium-sized businesses invariably need the same level of robust data protection as large enterprises, they often need to meet and support that requirement with relatively less IT budget and staffing," said Mark Peters, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

"The Tandberg Data AccuVault appliance exemplifies the kind of technology that can bridge that resource gap by enabling such users to deploy a turnkey backup solution that is simultaneously very well featured yet affordable and very simple to install and manage."

Based on Windows, the desktop machine the AccuVault RDX 1TB and two rackmount products AccuVault 1U 4TB and AccuVault 1U 8TB make up the new product line.

All three come with Tandberg's AccuGuard Enterprise data protection software, featuring source-based deduplication to increase storage efficiency.

The AccuVault RDX 1TB is designed to protect anything up to five servers or workstations. It comes with 1TB of fixed storage but also has 1TB of RDX QuikStor disk drives included to allow for safe offsite storage. The manufacturer suggested retail price comes in at $2,999 (1,947).

The AccuVault 1U 4TB is made for five to 20 servers, whilst the AccuVault 1U 8TB is for 20 to 40. Both models include RAID 5, hot-swappable drives and dual gigabit Ethernet and start from $8,499 and $15,999 respectively.

All three appliances will be available later this month.

AMD's launch of its Opteron 6100 processors throws the gauntlet down to Intel as it aims to remove the price barrier that has traditionally held SMBs back from moving up to 4-socket systems.

Intel's Xeon 7500 processors certainly deliver a host of features and a massive core count but as we've seen in our exclusive reviews of IBM's System x3850 X5 and Fujitsu's Primergy RX600 S5, their price point puts them way beyond the means of the majority of SMBs.

The R815 shares the same behavioural design concept offered by all the latest PowerEdge servers. The use of many similar components means that if your support staff know how to service one PowerEdge server then most components should be easily recognisable on all other models.

In fact, this server takes many features from the higher-end PowerEdge R810 which we exclusively reviewed in our sister title,PC Pro. It comprises the same 2U rack chassis where the front panel is split into two sections horizontally with the lower half providing a clear air flow through the chassis.

You have six hot-swap SFF disk bays in the upper half of the front panel and Dell offers a choice of SATA, SAS and SDD drives. The review system looks even better value as it included a quintet of 147GB 6Gb/sec SAS SFF hard disks plus Dell's PERC H700 RAID card.

Power redundancy is on the cards as the review system includes both 1023W hot-plug supplies. This is a key area of focus for AMD and the R815 delivered the goods in our power tests.

The Opteron 6174 processors in the review system have a low rating of 80W and our inline meter recorded 335W with Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise in idle. With all cores pushed to the limit by SiSoft Sandra we saw this peak at 618W.

AMD has the edge over Intel's 6500 and 7500 Xeons in the power department as a PowerEdge R810 with a pair of 2GHz X6550 Xeons and twice the memory pulled 392W in idle and 558W under peak load. Considering the R810 had 16 physical cores as opposed to 48 in the R815 the benefits of the Opteron are clear.

For virtualisation duties the R815 sports Dell's unique internal SD memory card controller. Dell set the ball rolling by being the first to provide an internal SD card for booting into a hypervisor but it's gone one step beyond as you now get two.

The controller keeps an onboard copy of the boot media in case it fails and the process is fully automated. We tested this by removing and reinserting the second card and saw the boot up process resynchronise its contents with the primary card.

More unique features are provided as the R815 sports Dell's Lifecycle Controller and its 1GB of NVRAM memory. This comes into its own for OS installation as we were able to boot the server into Dell's UEFI (unified extensible firmware interface) environment and deploy an OS without needing to use any boot media.

There's more as the iDRAC6 Enterprise management controller in the review system provides a dedicated network port and full remote access to the server. Dell also includes it Management Console software which provides automated discovery of all SNMP devices, inventory and system monitoring.

The R815 offers a completely toolfree internal design making for easy upgrades and maintenance. The motherboard has four banks of DIMM sockets and the front pair are accessed by releasing the hard disk bay and sliding it forward.

Cooling is handled by a row of six hot-swap fans in the centre of the chassis and the entire assembly can be removed after releasing clamps on each side. During testing we also found the R815 to be commendably quiet.

Expansion potential is very good as the server offers six PCI-e slots. You probably won't need them all as the R815 already has quad embedded Gigabit ports and the RAID card has its own dedicated slot as well.

In the extensive server benchtests we ran in PC Pro we saw that AMD's Opteron 6100 kept pace with Intel's new 5600 Xeon and at the lower end of the market can hold its own against the 6500 and 7500 Xeons as well.

Add in the fact that the PowerEdge R815 costs less than half that of an equivalent Xeon 7500 server and you have a serious candidate for SMBs looking to consolidate their older servers.

Verdict

As the first 4P Opteron 6100 server to market, Dell’s new PowerEdge R815 sets a high standard for the rest to follow. Compared with the latest Xeon 7500 systems, the R815 and its quartet of 12-Core Opterons makes for a far more cost-effective option for SMBs looking to consolidate older 1U and 2U servers or provide a highly expandable virtualisation platform.

Chassis: 2U rack CPU: 4 x 2.2GHz AMD 6174 12-core Opteron Memory: 64GB DDR3 1333MHz RDIMM expandable to 256GB Storage: Dual 1GB SD cards; 5 x 147GB Dell 10K.3 SFF 6Gb/s SAS hard disks in hot-swap carriers RAID: Dell PERC H700 with 512MB cache and BBU Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 50, 6 Expansion: 6 x PCI-e 2.0 Network: 4 x Gigabit Power: 2 x 1023W hot-plug supplies Management: iDRAC6 Enterprise with VFlash/SD Card and 10/100 port Software: Dell Management Console

Since Intel's launch of its Xeon 7500 processors we've already reviewed Dell's new PowerEdge R910 and in another exclusive review we take a close look at IBM's latest System x3850 X5. The R910 impressed us with its excellent build quality and features but the x3850 X5 takes this to the next level with a remarkable expansion potential.

As one of the new eX5 server portfolio, the x3850 X5 takes advantage of IBM's fifth generation EXA (enterprise X architecture) to deliver a unique range of expansion options. Firstly, you can increase memory capacity of the base system from the standard 1TB up to 1.5TB by adding a Max5 external memory expansion unit.

If that isn't enough, you can directly link a second x3850 X5 system so that the two servers become one. In this scenario you now have a single eight-way Xeon 7500 server capable of delivering up to 64 physical and 128 logical processor cores plus support for up to 2TB of DRR3 memory.

Storage capacity is reasonable as this 4U chassis supports a maximum of eight internal hot-swap SFF hard disks. The data optimised version supports IBM's new eXFlash 1.8in. SSDs and comes with a different backplane.

The base model can handle up to eight of these SSDs which can be increased to sixteen with an additional backplane. Linking two chassis together doubles the drive count for both SAS and SSD.

Internally, the server is very well designed with blue touch points showing items that can be removed by hand and orange ones to indicate they are hot-swappable. Two hot-swap 12cms diameter fans at the front deal with the main chassis and processor cooling and behind these are eight cold-swap memory cards each with eight DIMM slots.

You get a pair of embedded Gigabit ports but the price of the review system includes an Emulex dual-port 10GbE adapter. There's plenty of room for more as you have six spare PCI-e slots available. We also noted that the interior design of the R910 has restrictions on the length of expansion cards but in the x3850 X5 four of the slots can accommodate full-height, full-length cards.

For power usage there's little between the x3850 X5 and Dell's R910. For the latter, the review system had twice as much memory but otherwise a very similar specification and pulled 539W in idle which peaked at 859W under pressure.

To achieve such a high expansion potential IBM has tweaked the QPI links on the motherboard. The links between processor sockets 1 and 2 and sockets 3 and 4 have been routed through to ports at the rear of the server which, for a single node server, can accommodate a pair of IBM's wrap cards.

With two Xeon 7500 processors these aren't required but should be used for three and four processor configurations as they create a full QPI mesh. Note also that if you want to use all PCI-e slots then you must have four processors installed.

The Max5 memory expansion option is a 1U module that sits underneath the main server and uses a quad cable kit to connect it directly to the server's QPI links. This increases the DIMM slot count to 96 allowing the server to support 1.5TB of DDR3 memory.

There are some provisos as a two-node configuration each with a Max5 unit isn't currently supported which has an impact on IBM's FlexNode feature. Also, VMware's VSphere 4.0 doesn't currently support Max5.

In our article on Intel's Xeon 6500 and 7500 processors we mentioned a glue-less' design that allows servers to be expanded to eight sockets and this is what the x3850 showcases. Linking a pair of servers together requires an X5 QPI scalability kit and once connected, both nodes are presented as a single eight-way system with 128 DIMM slots.

IBM's FlexNode feature is designed to allow a pair of servers to be joined together and separated on the fly. This can be achieved directly from the IMM web management interface without the need to remove the cables between them.

However, FlexNode requires the servers to be linked via the EXA ports on the Max5 units. As we've already mentioned, a two-node setup with each server using Max5 units is not supported at present so the FlexNode option is not currently available on the x3850 X5.

The IMM allows you to monitor critical components, remotely control power and run unattended firmware upgrades. You also get full KVM-over-IP remote control, virtual boot media and an OS failure blue screen capture function.

IBM's Systems Director handles general systems management and is accessed via a tidy web interface packed with plenty of wizards. You can run network discoveries, collect and store hardware and software inventories and use its problem alerting system.

The results of the network discoveries are viewed from the Systems Director home page and options are provided for deploying agents to IBM and non-IBM systems. These allow you to collect inventory data, execute tasks such as file transfers and run remote control sessions using RDP or RealVNC.

All power management features are handled by the Active Energy Manager plug-in. This interacts with the server's IMM and provides power capping functions along with trend graphs of power consumption and system temperatures over time.

The x3850 X5 is an impressive rack server offering a lot of classy features in a compact chassis. IBM's unique expansion options are not all available yet but, even without FlexNode support, the x3850 X5 still offers an unprecedented potential that is unmatched by any other Xeon 7500 server currently available.

Verdict

The System x3850 X5 costs significantly more than a similarly specified Dell PowerEdge R910 but is its equal for features and beats it hands down for expansion potential. The ability to expand memory beyond 1TB and to link two servers together and present them as a single node makes it quite unique although note that IBM’s FlexNode feature is not currently available.

Chassis: 4U rack CPU: 4 x 2GHz X7550 Xeon (with 2 x QPI wrap cards) Memory: 64GB 1066MHz DDR3 RDIMM Storage: 4 x 73GB IBM SFF SAS 6Gb/sec hard disks in hot-swap carriers RAID: IBM ServeRAID M5015 with 512MB cache and BBU Array support: RAID0, 1, 5, 10, 50 (6 and 60 optional) Expansion: 7 x PCI-e 2.0 slots Network: 2 x Gigabit, Emulex dual 10GbE PCI-e adapter Power: 2 x 1975W hot-plug supplies Management: IBM IMM Software: IBM ServerGuide 8.3 and System Director 6.1.2

Launched in March, AMD's Opteron 6100 series of processors puts it right back in the fight with Intel as the new Magny-Cours' eight and 12 core chips allow it to compete directly not only with the 5500 and 5600 Xeons but also with the 6500 and 7500s.

A number of keys vendors have confirmed support but Supermicro trumps the likes of Dell, HP and Acer. Not only has it announced a broader range of motherboards and systems than anyone else but it also delivers the first Opteron 6100 production server well ahead of the rest.

The GP 1120-T is a 1U rack server supplied by Boston and sports a pair of 12-core 2.2GHz Opteron 6174 modules partnered by 24GB of DDR3 memory. Your processor options have been simplified by AMD as all the 6100 Series have the same 12MB of L3 cache, the same HyperTransport speed and all support 1333MHz DDR3 memory.

Choice with AMD just comes down to whether you want eight or 12 cores, one, two or four processor sockets and what clock speed. With Intel's Xeon 5500 and 5600 Series you have a bewildering range of QPI, clock and memory speeds, four or six cores, HT and Turbo Boost support and varying power consumptions.

The GP 1120-T is a smart combo of Supermicro's 1U rack chassis and H8DGU-F motherboard and at only 26in. deep, the chassis will fit in a wide range of cabinets. Storage potential is solid but unremarkable with room for a quartet of standard 3.5in hot-swap bays and the price includes a full complement of 500GB WD Enterprise SATA drives.

There's space at the front for a DVD drive along with power and recessed reset buttons. A small panel sits to the right with a collection of status LEDs for disk and network activity plus fault notification. A handy UID button alongside activates blue LEDs fore and aft for easy server identification in a rack cabinet.

Storage redundancy is limited as the motherboard uses an Adaptec HostRAID embedded controller which only supports stripes and mirrors. The four drives were preconfigured in a RAID10 striped mirror but the controller doesn't offer an option to upgrade to RAID-5.

The rectangular Opteron 6174 modules may be bigger than your average Xeon but they don't require much extra space to accommodate them and their attendant passive heatsinks. Each socket is partnered by eight DIMM slots and if you have bottomless pockets you can go up to a maximum of 256GB using 16GB DIMM modules.

The 1120-T offers some interesting expansion options as the motherboard accepts Supermicro's UIO (universal I/O) cards. These fit into the gap at the back of the L-shaped motherboard and plug directly into an interface slot at the bottom of the central riser card.

It's a neat arrangement as the UIO card sits flush with the motherboard so doesn't obstruct the riser card's own PCI-e expansion slot above it. This is where you can improve your storage outlook as Supermicro offers a wide range of UIO cards including 8port SAS RAID controllers which can be upgraded to RAID5 with battery backup.

Cooling is handled by a bank of cold-swap dual-rotor fans in front of the motherboard and we found noise levels to be impressively low. There's room for two more fans alongside and these are positioned to cool any UIO or standard expansion cards you decide to fit.

Power redundancy is provided as the server came with both 650W hot-plug power supplies. For a 24-core server, the 1120-T is surprisingly frugal with our in-line power meter showing a 163W draw with Windows Server 2008 R2 in idle. With SiSoft Sandra giving all the cores a heavy workout we saw this rise to a peak of 356W.

Remote management is present and correct as the F' variant of this motherboard has an embedded RMM and dedicated network port. This allows the server to be remotely accessed via a tidy web browser interface offering plenty of operational information.

You can keep an eye on a range of sensors for critical components and have full control over the power supply. For access security you can use LDAP or RADIUS servers for external authentication to the remote controller and decide what each user is allowed to do. KVM-over-IP is a valuable feature as this allows you to access the BIOS setup menu and OS remotely and designate devices on remote hosts as virtual media.

The GP 1120-T shows clearly Supermicro's commitment to AMD and from our experience it'll be a while before we see any other vendors releasing similar products to market. Boston also sets a high standard as it packs an impressive processing density into a compact 1U rack server and combines this with good expansion potential and remote management features.

Verdict

As the first example of AMD’s new 12-core Opteron 6100 to market, the Boston GP 1120-T delivers plenty of processing power in a compact 1U chassis.

Storage and RAID options aren’t particularly exciting but it offers a high core count, modest power demands and is competitively priced.

Chassis: 1U rack

CPU: 2 x 2.2GHz AMD Opteron 6174

Memory: 24GB 1333MHz DDR3 expandable to 256GB

Storage: 4 x 500GB WD Enterprise SATA hard disks in hot-swap carriers

RAID: Embedded 6-port SATA controller

Array support: RAID0, 1, 10

Expansion: UIO slot, PCI-e 16X 2.0 slot

Network: 2 x Gigabit

Power: 2 x 650W hot-plug supplies

Management: Embedded RMM with 10/100 port

Software: Supermicro SuperO Doctor III

The debate about personal internet use in the workplace may rumble on but it's still clear that unmonitored access is costing businesses dearly with lost productivity. The new mantra is to allow some personal use to keep the troops happy but retain overall control with clearly defined AUPs.

This means web filtering solutions have to be even more flexible as they need to strike a happy medium between the two requirements. Having focused on web filtering for many years, Clearswift has a lot of experience in this field and in this exclusive review we put its latest Web Appliance ENW through its paces.

This is Clearswift's flagship appliance aimed at businesses with between 500 and 3,000 users. Clearswift has a strong partnership with Dell so the hardware platform comes courtesy of a PowerEdge R610 1U rack server. This choice gets our thumbs up as in our exclusive review we rated it as one of the best rack servers we'd seen.

Single deployments will only need one of the quartet of Gigabit ports as the ENW is designed primarily to function as a standard web proxy. A transparent proxy mode is also supported but will require a suitable switch capable of intercepting and redirecting web traffic.

A heap of new features are included in v2.0 of these appliances. Kaspersky still handles all anti-virus functions whilst Sunbelt Software continues to look after anti-spyware scanning duties but Clearswift's URL filtering has a stronger focus on malware and phishing threats.

The URL database gets boosted from 40 to 76 categories and better reporting shows where URLs have been classed under multiple categories. An automatic user feedback mechanism is designed to rapidly reduce the number of external sites being classed as unknown and this can also be used to correctly categorise a company's own Intranet sites.

We found installation in the lab simple enough as we connected the appliance to the main network, pointed a web browser at its default IP address and ran through a quick start routine. This asks for basic information including your licenses, network addresses, mail server details plus proxy settings and finishes up by securing all administrative access.

As we went for the standard proxy mode we needed to configure our test clients to point at the appliance. This was a manual process but larger sites can easily achieve this using AD group policies or PAC (proxy auto-configuration) scripts.

The main management interface hasn't changed a great deal but it does see a few design tweaks to make it even easier to use. The web console opens with an informative display showing a graphical overview of system health, a list of alerts and swift access to the various Centers.

Web filtering policies, user management, system configuration and report creation are placed under different Centers making for easier access. Usefully, the appliance immediately applies a default web access policy to all users but we'd recommend taking time to understand how the policies work before fiddling with them.

The fundamentals behind Clearswift's web filtering haven't changed from when we last looked at the previous ENW model. Rather than reiterate them take a look at the review we ran in 2008, which describes the processes.

We mentioned that the lack of scheduling was a drawback and Clearswift has now included this to allow policies to be active at specified times. You can also apply limits on the amount of time a user may browse a particular category for but support for scanning HTTPS encrypted traffic is still an optional feature.

We could create policies to allow access to a selection of these sites, possibly during lunch breaks and only for specific users. Another useful addition is a URL classification tool where you enter the web address and the appliance will tell you which category it falls under. We did find during testing that effective control of IM apps such as Windows Live will require additional firewall rules to be configured and P2P apps are out of the equation.

The Report Center offers a good range of predefined reports which can be customised to suit. We could see the most popular sites, those generating the most traffic, who was visiting them, what spyware activity was occurring and so on and all can be exported to PDF or CSV formats. This has also been improved to allow reports on specific policy routes to be created.

We were impressed when we last looked at Clearswift's web filtering appliance and this latest version delivers a number of important updates. Its category database is now one of the largest and the policy based access controls see enough improvements to make it highly suited to an extensive range of business requirements.

Verdict

Clearswift’s web access policies do present a steep learning curve to newcomers but once you’re familiar with them they are easy enough to create. Better controls for IM and P2P apps would be welcome but the new features in this latest v2.0 version do make the Web Appliance ENW a highly versatile solution for strictly controlling and monitoring web access in the workplace.

Chassis: Dell PowerEdge R610 CPU: 2 x 2.26GHz Xeon E5520 Memory: 4GB DDR3 Storage: 3 x 146GB 10K SAS hard disks in RAID-5 RAID: Dell PERC 6/i controller Network: 4 x Gigabit Ethernet Power: Dual hot-swap supplies Management: Web browser Options: HTTPS scanning for 500 users, £2,950 ex VAT

It may be best known for its anti-virus software products but Panda moved into the security appliance market a number of years ago and now offers an extensive range of hardware solutions. The GateDefender Performa family focuses on delivering web content security at the network perimeter and the latest 9100 now adds controls for IM and P2P apps to its anti-spam, anti-malware and web content filtering features.

As the 9100 functions as a transparent gateway it's a cinch to deploy. We popped it in between our LAN and firewall enabling it to scan inbound and outbound HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3 and NNTP protocols without any need to reconfigure our network clients.

The appliance comes as standard with a dual-port Gigabit card which has a hardware bypass circuit, so if the system goes belly-up it won't take all internet access with it. For greater fault tolerance it also supports load balancing across a pair of appliances.

The 9100 is the second in a family of four Performa appliances and is designed to handle up to 500Mbps of web traffic and 220 messages per second. The hardware platform looks up to the job as Panda has opted to use a decent Sun Fire X2100 1U rack server equipped with a 2.8GHz dual-core Opteron and 4GB of DDR2 memory.

The anti-spam module provides a good range of options for handling suspect emails.

The management web interface is a smart affair that provides easy access to all the features. You have two layers of security as the appliance enforces policy based security settings first followed by global settings for each security module.

To use policies you start by creating network definitions, which describe IP addresses, ranges or subnets, LDAP servers, users and domains. You then access the settings management page where you define custom configurations for the anti-malware, web content filter, URL filter and anti-spam modules.

Next you use protection profiles to tie your settings together with network definitions. This enables you to create multiple policies so you can apply different AUPs to users, groups and systems and tie them in with AD authentication if required. We found policies easy enough to create but did note that the IM and P2P module only offers global security restrictions and cannot be included in settings management.

Panda claims an almost 100 per cent' anti-spam success rate and after testing the 9100 for a week in a live environment we can honestly say we agree. This feature comes courtesy of CloudMark and to test it we left it on its default settings and configured Outlook clients to download mail from live accounts.

The web filtering module offers plenty of categories although its performance isn't great.

We asked the appliance to tag suspect messages and pass them on where our clients' Outlook rules moved them into separate folders. At the end of the live test we found a single, solitary spam message had slipped through whilst only five messages were incorrectly tagged as spam.

Web site filtering is handled by Cobion, which offers over twenty main URL categories under which you have more than sixty sub-categories to pick and choose from. Unfortunately, Cobion proved to be less capable at its job that the CloudMark anti-spam.

The anti-malware module provides stiff protection measures that can be customised to suit.

To test filtering we blocked the gaming and gambling categories and Googled for online poker and bingo sites. Of the forty poker sites we visited we were blocked from all but six. However, in our search for bingo games we were allowed through to over a third of those visited.

From the anti-malware module you can configure virus scanning on all or just selected protocols and when a virus is detected the appliance can attempt to clean or delete it. A quarantine area is provided where emails it was unable to clean will be placed, whilst for HTTP and FTP you can have the transmission blocked.

Infected email attachments can be stripped out and inbound messages that are suspected of being generated by viral activity will be deleted completely. The protocols you selected for virus scanning will also be scanned for spyware, whereas phishing messages can be redirected, deleted or have a warning inserted in them.

Panda's content filters can be applied to HTTP and FTP traffic and we needed to add Windows Update to the appliance's trusted web site list as it initially blocked all automatic updates. Filters can also be created that check for text keywords in email message content and carry out predefined actions.

Protection profiles enable multiple security policies to be used for different groups of users and systems.

The new IM and P2P module provides a list of common apps and is designed purely to block or allow them. Using Windows Live Messenger on our client systems we found that with IM blocking activated those already logged in could no longer communicate with each other and newcomers weren't allowed to log in.

During the review we found the browser interface well designed and providing easy access to all features, It opens with a status screen showing the status of warnings, active modules and update times. Graphs show all activity for the anti-spam, malware and web content filtering modules along with inbound and outbound traffic on the two network interfaces.

All signature and database updates are handled automatically every fifteen minutes but you can run them manually as well. Plenty of reports are provided for each module and you can access and view the contents of the quarantine areas, print out the details, export them to text files and clear them down.

The Performa 9100 scores highly for its easy installation and anti-spam capabilities and it looks good value as well, although the number of sites that slipped through the web site filter database in our tests was some cause for concern.

Verdict

We were impressed with the Performa’s easy deployment and excellent anti-spam performance in our live tests. It offers plenty of other security features and the web interface is very intuitive but the Cobion URL web filtering category database could do better.

Chassis: 1U Sun Fire X2100 rack mount

CPU: 2.8GHz AMD Opteron 1220

Memory: 4GB 667MHz DDR2

Storage: 250GB Seagate Barracuda SATA hard disk

Network: Dual port Gigabit card with hardware bypass

Management: Web browser

EXCLUSIVE

Despite Intel launching its latest Xeon 5500 processors back in March it's taken until now for us to get our hands on one of IBM's new System x servers that support these. Dell was one of the first to market with its slick PowerEdge R610, which set a very high standard in terms of new features - and in this exclusive review we see how well IBM's latest System x3550 M2 stacks up against it.

Build quality of this 1U chassis is good and IBM has upped the storage stakes as the x3550 has room at the front for six 2.5in SFF SAS or SATA hard disk in hot-swap carriers. This puts it on a par with the PowerEdge R610 but it's beaten by HP's new sixth generation DL360, which has room for eight SFF drives you can see our exclusive review of the DL360 G6 in our sister title PC Pro.

IBM offers a good range of RAID options and you can start with no controller and upgrade to the ServeRAID-BR10i PCI-e card, which delivers support for stripes and mirrors. Next up is the ServeRAID-MR10i in the review system, which brings in support for RAID-5 and dual-redundant RAID-6 arrays plus an optional battery backup pack.

We found the lid on the review unit very difficult to remove but once inside we could see that IBM has worked on design as the x3550 presents a tidy interior. Cooling is handled by a bank of six dual-rotor hot-swap fan modules arranged across the front of the motherboard and after power up, the x3550 settles down to a quiet hum - this server certainly won't be noticed in a typical office environment.

Virtualisation is in the spotlight this year with both Dell and HP adding SD memory cards slots to their rack servers to enable them to boot embedded hypervisors. IBM hasn't gone quite as far as the x3550 only offers a dedicated internal USB interface located on the side of the RAID card riser but this can be used to boot the server with VMware ESXi 3.5.

Whereas Dell has embedded four Gigabit ports in the R610, IBM has stuck with two although this can be increased by adding a separate dual-port Gigabit daughtercard. Further expansion looks good as the server has a pair of riser cards each with a 16X PCI-Express slot. There's room for one half-length, full-height and one low profile card and you can opt for PCI-X risers instead.

For initial server configuration wave goodbye to the BIOS and say hello to IBM's new UEFI (unified extensible firmware interface). This provides access to a setup menu for general server configuration, a boot device manager and a smart diagnostics GUI. This is similar to that provided with the new PowerEdge servers but Dell does go much further as its Lifecycle Controller offers features such as server update tools and the ability to store device drivers for immediate availability.

To install an OS locally you still need to boot the x3550 with IBM's ServerGuide disc Dell's Lifecycle Controller has all these integrated. IBM doesn't supply ServerGuide as standard anymore so it must be downloaded first and we recommend doing this in the wee small hours as IBM's support site is seriously slow during normal working hours.

Nevertheless, we found ServerGuide easy enough to work with as it provides access to the RAID controller for array setup and, once you've added all your user details, it'll get on with installing your chosen OS where the remainder of the process is largely unattended.

For full remote server access, IBM takes a leaf out of HP's book as it's dumped its optional RSA (remote supervisor adapter) card and replaced it with an embedded IMM (integrated management module). which presents a dedicated network port at the rear. Essentially, this provides the same web interface as the RSA, offers an enhanced feature set and can be upgraded to a premium version, which adds remote control, virtual boot media and OS failure screen capture.

For general systems management, IBM's Director also gets its marching orders as it's been replaced with Systems Director 6.1. This is a much needed improvement as Director has been looking long in the tooth for a while now. System Director provides a much smarter browser interface and starts with a network discovery routine. Agents are provided for IBM and non-IBM systems and you can collect inventory data, set up an alerting system, run file transfers and fire up remote control sessions using RDP or RealVNC.

Power management doesn't get off lightly either as the new Active Energy Manager plug-in replaces the PowerExecutive utility. This interacts with the server's BMC and provides power capping along with trend graphs of power consumption and system temperatures over time.

The x3550 M2 delivers a good overall package for the price but IBM hasn't gone as far as HP or Dell with design innovations and new features. The new management software and embedded IMM controller are much needed improvements but we still rate Dell's PowerEdge R610 as the best 1U rack server currently on the market.

Verdict

IBM has made significant steps forward with its latest ‘system x’ servers and the x3550 M2 offers a good expansion potential, whilst remote management tools see significant and timely improvements. It’s well designed with a low power requirement and equally low noise levels but has to settle for a close second to Dell’s new PowerEdge R610 for value and features.

Chassis: 1U rack

CPU: 1 x 2.53GHz Xeon E5540

Memory: 10GB DDR3-1333 RDIMM expandable to 128GB

Storage: 2 x 300GB IBM 10k SAS SFF hard disks in hot-swap carriers

RAID: IBM ServeRAID-MR10i SAS/SATA PCI-e card

Array support: RAID0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60

Expansion: 2 x PCI-e 8X

Network: 2 x Gigabit Ethernet

Power: 1 x 675W hot-plug supply

Management: Embedded IMM with Premium upgrade

Software: IBM ServerGuide, Systems Director 6.1

Sun Microsystems has continued to draw the focus away from the IBM buyout rumours but this time by joining the other major companies in releasing a new line of products featuring the new Intel Nehalem chips.

Yesterday it announced new servers, integrated open storage and high-performance networking.

John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun's systems group, said: "Today, Sun is taking integrated compute, software, networking and storage to the next level and our innovations are giving HPC customers the speed, scalability and simplicity to help solve the world's greatest challenges."

Sun has combined the new dual-node Sun Blade X6275 server module, powered by the Intel Xeon 5500 series, with the new Sun Blade 6048 InfiniBand Quad Data Rate Network Express Module, the Sun Blade 6048 chassis, the Sun Cooling Door system, the Lustre file system and Sun's Open Storage portfolio.

On top of this it announced that its Sun Blade server nodes can be specified to run a variety of operating systems including Linux, Windows, Solaris and OpenSolaris.

In addition to the new blade servers, Sun also launched a range of rack servers and workstations powered by the Xeon 5500.

A spokesperson from Sun said: "The HPC networking solutions announced today help to maximise performance with an integrated signalling and switching approach that uses the latest available technology to optimise per-node performance and system-wide scaling for application communications and I/O."

"Using these solutions, customers can dramatically simplify their environment from less highly integrated solutions - reducing cabling by 84 per cent, switches by 97 per cent, and rack space by 75 per cent."

Large institutions such as the Australian National University and the University of Zurich have already signed up to use the new range.

IBM's latest single socket rack server has a keen focus on power-strapped data centres as it's designed to be more efficient and greener than standard dual socket servers. The new mantra for IBM is RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability) and despite only being a low-profile 1U system, the x3350 aims to satisfy all these criteria.

There may be plenty of hype surrounding server virtualization but the x3350 is designed for environments that don't require this or have applications that don't support it. It's also aimed at serving up dedicated applications such as web and mail services or for deployment in branch offices. IBM's thinking here is that by offering a server with a single, high performance dual- or quad-core Xeon you can do away with the need for a traditional dual-socket server and the extra costs it entails.

The chassis is up to the typically high standard of build quality we expect from IBM. It's paid particular attention to cooling as the system's internal workings have been redesigned to improve air-flow and the end result is the chassis only uses four small dual-rotor fans to reduce power consumption and noise. They're all hot-swappable and chassis' lid has a couple of flaps enabling the fans to be easily extracted.

Despite its low profile the x3350 supports a good range of storage options. For the lowest cost you can start with a basic 3.5in cold-swap dual drive bay and connect the drives directly to the pair of SATA ports on the motherboard. If you want SATA RAID then add the optional LSI-based mini-PCI controller, which offers support for mirrors and stripes.

The review system came kitted out with the full monty as it had the four drive SFF hard disk bay filled with a quartet of 2.5in 73GB IBM SAS drives. It also had the mini-PCI card installed, but this lies idle, as the price includes IBM's ServeRAID SAS/SATA PCI-e card. This occupies one of the x8 PCI-e slots at the rear and delivers support for RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 50, 6 and 60 arrays - and also accepts an optional battery backup unit.

The price includes a 3GHz X3370 Xeon module, which uses the latest 45nm manufacturing process, sports a pair of 6MB L2 caches and has a reasonable TDP of 95W. This sits near the front of the motherboard as close to the fans as possible and is mounted by a chunky copper heatsink. Alongside are four DIMM sockets with two occupied by 1GB 800MHz DDR2 modules and maximum capacity is 8GB.

IBM's design boffins seem to have got it right as we found the server settled down to a gentle hum after power up making it suited to office deployment as well as the data centre. Power redundancy is on the menu as the system came with both 450W hot-plug supplies. It's also easy on the supply as our in-line meter measured the server consuming 33W in standby and 115W with Windows Server 2003 R2 idling along. With SiSoft Sandra thrashing all four processor cores to the max we saw utilisation peak at only 180W.

Server installation gets off to a good start as you can boot the system with the bundled ServerGuide CD-ROM which has seen a number of improvements to its interface making it even easier to use. It guides you through hard disk and RAID setup, system partition creation, driver installation and loading your chosen OS. Once you've provided all the necessary information the rest of the process is largely unattended.

For year's IBM's Director has been its mainstay for server management and although the system was supplied with v5.2 this has now been replaced with the latest Systems Director 6.1, which sees some significant and very welcome improvements. Gone is the old triple pane interface to be replaced with a smart new web console which opens with an option to run a network discovery.

It'll pick up all systems with the Director agent installed and any SNMP-enabled systems as well. Agents have been updated, as you now have a common agent, which enables systems other than IBMs to be fully managed. Alternatively, you can use the core services agent, which supports a reduced set of management tasks but has a lighter footprint.

All menus are easily accessed from the left side bar where you can run regular network discoveries, collect inventory data and view the status of selected systems. Virtual servers are now supported and a range of remote access features is provided so you can run file transfers and fire up remote control sessions using RDP or RealVNC.

Power management also gets a boost as the older PowerExecutive utility gets its marching orders and is replaced with the new Active Energy Manager plug-in for Systems Director. The x3350 doesn't support the power capping and saving features but the power monitoring enables you to view trend graphs of power usage and system temperatures over time.

The power management tools interact with the server's embedded baseboard management controller, which is also used by the Systems Director to remotely power the server on and off or restart it. The x3350 also has room for IBM's optional Remote Supervisor Adapter SlimLine II card, which offers remote browser access to the server and provides a similar feature set to HP's embedded iLO2 controller.

Businesses looking to upgrade older dual socket servers will find the x3350 a cost-effective alternative that's low on power but big on performance. Storage features and general redundancy are good and as the previous version was looking very dated the new systems management software is a very timely addition.

Verdict

The x3350 offers a good specification for the price making it a sound candidate as a replacement for dual socket rack servers. Plenty of component redundancy and storage features are included and the new Systems Director software is a vast improvement on its predecessor.

Chassis: 1U rack

CPU: 3GHz Xeon X3370

Memory: 2GB of 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM expandable to 8GB

Storage: 4 x 73.4GB IBM 10k SAS SFF hard disks in hot-swap carriers

RAID: IBM ServeRAID-MR10i SAS/SATA PCI-e card

Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 50, 6, 60

Expansion: 2 x PCI-e 8X

Network: 2 x Gigabit Ethernet

Power: 2 x 450W hot-plug supplies

Management: Embedded IPMI 2.0 BMC

Software: IBM ServerGuide 8.1, Systems Director 6.1

There are plenty of standards designed to protect personal and sensitive data and businesses that don't take regulatory compliance seriously are finding this can be a costly mistake. Log data management and analysis are important parts of the process and LogRhythm combines these functions into an appliance based solution and augments them with detailed log and event analysis.

LogRhythm is deployed as an appliance running Windows Server 2003 R2 and it offers a number of hardware solutions. On review we have the entry-level LR-500-XM, which is delivered as a good quality Dell PowerEdge 1950 1U rack server. The price shown includes support for 100 log sources but this can be upgraded as required.

We deployed our appliance as an all-in-one solution running the Log Manager and Event Manager components but you can distribute functions such as log gathering across multiple servers running LogRhythm agents. LogRhythm offers Log Manager agents for Windows, Unix and Solaris host systems and these don't need to be dedicated to this task.

LogRhythm accepts log data from a wide range of sources and support includes syslog, syslog-ng, Windows drive mapping and Event Logs, ODBC connectors for database logs, flat files such as ASCII text, Cisco NetFlow and CheckPoint OPSEC/LEA collections.

The software is managed locally or remotely with a dedicated console, which we found easy to get to grips with. The console can be installed on any remote system and supports all versions of Windows. Deployment is simple enough as you tell your source devices where to send their log data to and LogRhythm will automatically collect this traffic.

Devices such as Windows servers can be automatically identified by their traffic so the appliance can add information such as the OS and version, hostname, associated IP address and Windows Event Logs. Other devices such as security appliances and routers that may be sending syslog data will need to be updated manually to specify the device type. LogRhythm does this as part of its customer deployment service so no user intervention is required.

Logs stored on the appliance are all digitally signed on receipt so it can be proved they haven't been subsequently tampered with and archives are also digitally signed to ensure their integrity. Archive locations can be any type of storage device such as DAS, NAS, IP SAN and FC SAN.

The console opens with the My Personal Dashboard tab, which provides graphical views on virtually any type of log related activity and potential security breach. Events are shown by functions such as operational, security and audit functions and you can decide how device log data events are to be classified.

You can select events and drill down for more information. Select a spike on a graph and the Log/Event Analyser will show you only those related events. The Log Viewer displays raw data and selecting a single event shows more detailed information including metadata.

Forensics tools are accessed from the Investigate screen where query creation is helped along by wizard based routines. You can choose a log source and time period, pick from a list of event types, add filters to fine tune the results and schedule them to run at regular intervals. The LogRhythm Tail feature can be configured to monitor multiple log streams enabling you to run forensics investigations in real time.

Reporting is very good as the LogRhythm Report Center offers a wide range of predefined reports, which can be customised to suit. A key feature is LogRhythm includes all report packages for PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOX, FISMA and GLBA as standard LogLogic, for example, considers them options and charges accordingly.

The latest LogRhythm 4.1 software offers a number of new features and first up is Second Look. When data is collected it is parsed and metadata for various fields is maintained on the appliance. This means original log data can be archived quickly to ensure space on the appliance is put to best use.

Second Look enables archived logs to be imported back into the appliance and additional rules run against them to update their metadata. It's also worth noting that when archived data is restored it goes into a separate database on the appliance and is check-summed to make sure it hasn't been tampered with.

LogRhythm's host based contextualization enables you to follow a set of seemingly unrelated incidents that together could be considered a security breach. For example, this function could be used to monitor a specific user authentication followed by a transfer of a file over a certain size to an external IP address outside normal business hours.

Access controls to log data are extensive with administrators having full access, whilst analyst accounts enables these users to see log data and reports but not administer the appliance. Roles restrict access further as these contain specific devices, groups of devices and log data sources. A good example would be restricting analysts to viewing the Windows security event log on specified systems but not their application log.

For storage management, you have full control over how all log and event information is stored. You can decide at the device, event and rule level whether data should be archived, how long it should be kept on the appliance, when it can be discarded or if it should be kept at all. This flexibility over how log data should be retained enables local storage to be managed more efficiently thus negating the need to upgrade to higher capacity and higher cost hardware platforms.

The comprehensive log monitoring and reporting tools offered by LogRhythm will make it much easier for businesses to tighten security and prove regulatory compliance. The appliance is very easy to deploy and scores highly for value as the price includes all the key standards compliancy report packages.

Verdict

There are a good range of log management solutions on the market so companies don’t really have any excuses for failing to meet data protection regulations. LogRhythm scores over many as it is particularly easy to deploy and use and offers good value as all key compliancy report packages are included in the price.

Chassis: Dell PowerEdge 1950 1U rack CPU: 2.66GHz quad-core Xeon Memory: 4GB 667MHz FB-DIMM Storage: 2 x 300GB Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 SAS drives in RAID-1 RAID: Dell PERC 6/i controller Network: 2 x Gigabit Ethernet Power: 2 x hot-swap supplies OS: Windows Server 2003 R2 (5 CALs) Database: SQL Server 2005 Enterprise (3 CALs) Management: LogRhythm Console utility