HP delivers another server workhorse

You know a product is good when you keep trying to think of ways not to send it back to its maker. Hewlett-Packard's HP ProLiant DL380 G4 is one of those products. It arrived in time for a test of desktop encryption solutions and then stayed around for a few other projects.

Free IT resource Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) May 22-23, 2007 Sponsored by OSBC Free IT resource TechNet: More ways to know it, share it, and keep it running. Sponsored by Microsoft HP ProLiant DL380 G4 Hewlett-Packard, hp.com Very Good  8.2 criteria score weight Availability 8 25% Performance 8 20% Scalability 8 20% Management 8 15% Serviceability 9 10% Value 9 10% Cost: As tested, $6,087 Platforms: Windows 2000/2003 Server; Red Hat and Suse Linux Bottom Line: HP’s latest version of its DL380 server is big, powerful, and can do nearly anything you’re likely to need a stand-alone server to do. It holds enough storage and memory for most departmental and enterprise apps, and it has enough processing power to make those applications run very fast indeed. Although the 2U chassis is heavy, when in the rack it provides a wealth of redundancy. About our Reviews and Scoring Methodology

Just when I was ready to send it back to HP, a server in a PBX review tanked -- once again into the breach went the DL380, and once again it performed perfectly.

HP has designed a capable, high-performance, highly flexible server for the enterprise rack and has priced it so that it's a reasonable buy for departments and the SMB market. The DL380 seems to embody an IT manager's wish list: No matter what I asked of this machine, it delivered.

Powering up

HP does not include an operating system with the DL380; the company says that the DL380 will support Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003, as well as two flavors of Linux -- Red Hat and Suse. It is an industry-standard Intel-based machine, so nearly any OS for Intel systems should work if you can find the drivers.

Inside the gray box are provisions for one or two Intel Xeon processors running at speeds as fast as 3.8GHz. Memory runs at 400MHz, and it supports both ECC (error-correcting code) and online spare memory. There's a megabyte of cache for each processor (2MB is available for some), and the FSB (front-side bus) runs at 800MHz.

The DL380 uses EM64T processors, so you can run 64-bit software on them -- assuming you can find it. You can mount six hot-swap Ultra 320 SCSI drives that are removable from the front of the chassis, and the USB port is accessible from the front of the server, which is a significant convenience for the IT staff.

The DL380 G4 will support 12GB of memory, and HP also makes it available with speeds as fast as 3.6GHz on dual-core Xeon processors and 2MB of Level 2 cache. The machine I tested had three 72GB Ultra 320 SCSI hard drives configured to the default of RAID 5 and 1GB of memory.

I installed Windows Server 2003 for this test, and other than enduring the tedium of installing Windows, about the only thing you have to do to get the DL380 running is to tell the BIOS on the embedded SCSI controller whether you want the installed drives configured as a RAID or as individual drives. That takes just a few seconds after making the menu choice on boot-up.

Serviceability with a smile

At this point, you have the opportunity to configure the network settings for the embedded iLO (Integrated Lights-Out) management system. You don't have to configure that to use the server, but you should do it before the server goes into service. iLO allows you to operate the server remotely, using a separate Ethernet adapter; it can be configured to use a completely separate network from the production system.

After you have set the network configuration, you'll find that HP's iLO system is one of the best management utilities in servers of this class. The iLO interface is both clear and intuitive. Because it exists independently of the installed OS, you can use it to boot up the server or to manage or restart a server that has crashed. However, iLO is all you get in terms of management tools -- there are no extra management utilities like some vendors offer.