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31 Oct 2011
HP hasn't made any radical changes to the seventh generation of the DL360. Performance and scalability are up, the number of Ethernet ports doubled and there's more storage capacity. The biggest improvements are in energy efficiency and management.
Pros:
ILO 3 management controller, 'Sea of Sensors' monitoring, up to 384GB RAM, eight hot-swap disks
Cons:
HP has yet to match Dell's Lifecycle Controller
Price: £4,596 + VAT as reviewed
Manufacturer: HP
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.
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
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