HP ProLiant DL360 G7 server review

It's been over 10 years since HP's ProLiant DL360 server was introduced, during which time it's become a firm favourite with corporate buyers looking for a powerful yet compact datacentre platform.

The seventh generation is far from revolutionary, but HP has introduced a number of upgrades into the 1U server, including more storage capacity and a revamped Integrated Lights-Out (ILO) management controller.

The G7 is still a dual-socket server designed to take the same Intel Xeon 5500/5600 processors as its G6 predecessor, albeit with a wider choice of dual-, quad- and six-core chips. As such, it can service a huge range of applications, all the way from simple file and print sharing through to web-based apps, database hosting and server consolidation.

Memory capacity has been significantly enhanced. Our review unit came with 12GB of DDR3 on six 2GB Dimms, which is standard for pre-configured 'performance' models. However, with 18 slots altogether and larger modules, up to 384GB can be installed if required.

HP's ILO management controller gets a major refresh on this model, and we found version three a lot slicker and more responsive. This was especially the case when connecting to the server using the integrated or optional Java remote console. We were also impressed by the improvements made to the virtual media performance, which made loading an operating system over the LAN a great deal quicker.

A lot of effort has also gone into improving the cooling and minimising the energy requirements of the DL360. The new easy to remove air baffle allows for better direct airflow through the unit. There's support too for the HP 'Sea of Sensors' technology. This sees up to 32 sensors scattered around the motherboard to keep a close eye on the temperature of critical components such as processors and memory, and automatically adjust the cooling effort to suit.

Cooling on the DL360 G7 is handled by a set of hot-plug modules located roughly in the centre of the chassis, each equipped with two dual-rotor fans. Ours had a full set of four cooling modules to cope with the two six-core Xeon X5650s processors we were provided with, whereas customers starting off with one socket empty will get only three as standard.

On the downside, it's worth noting that the remote console and virtual media options are available only if you upgrade from a standard to an advanced ILO licence, an upgrade that also offers real-time and historical graphs of power consumption.

Disappointingly, there's nothing yet from HP to match the Lifecycle Controller found on comparable Dell PowerEdge models, an option that dispenses with the need for bootable media when configuring servers.

However, the ILO controller does have its own dedicated Fast Ethernet port and a web-based interface, as well as support for HP's Insight Control console. Plus the G7 server has four Gigabit interfaces for ordinary network traffic, double the number on the previous G6 build.

Storage capacity gets an uplift too with SAS disks up to 900GB now available from HP, giving a maximum of 7.2TB on the G7 models, up from 4.8TB on the G6.

Unfortunately, space constraints mean that the number of drive bays stays the same, with four hot-swap bays as standard, upgradeable to eight, which is what we had on the review server.

These can take Sata, SAS or SSD drives, ours shipping with three 10K 300GB SAS drives cabled to an HP Smart Array P410i Raid controller located in its own custom slot. Other Raid cards can be specified, with two PCIe expansion slots available, one full size and one low profile, both of which come empty on standard HP configurations.

Some things, of course, will never change, not least HP's legendary build quality - the DL360 G7 called for two people to safely position the server in our test rack. Once in place, however, it proved easy to access with a large lift-off lid and lots of clearly marked hot-swap components inside.

The G7 also features support for the HP Common Slot Power Supply which means being able to share supplies with other models (including the DL360 G6), saving time and the cost of keeping lots of different spares on-hand in large datacentres. Ours had a redundant pair of 460W modules fitted, and more powerful 750W and 1,200W supplies are also available.

During testing we loaded Windows Server 2008 R2 and found that the dual six-core Xeons handled everything we threw at them with ease. With up to 12 cores and 384GB of memory to play with, the DL360 G7 is a firm favourite for virtualisation, so there's an internal SD Card slot to take an embedded hypervisor. This option puts the finishing touch to this highly capable and surprisingly scalable 1U workhorse.

1U rack-mount chassis
Dual 6-core Xeon X5650 processors (2.66GHz)
12GB DDR3 RDimm memory, Intel 5520 chipset
8 x 2.5in hot-swap drive bays
3 x 300GB 10K SAS disks
HP Smart Array P410i RAID controller with 1GB battery-backed cache
ILO 3 management controller with dedicated Fast Ethernet interface
4 x Gigabit Ethernet network ports
4 x USB
2 x PCIe expansion slots
SD Card slot for embedded hypervisor