Product Reviews

AMD has certainly kept us waiting for its much-vaunted Intel-beating quad-core Opteron, but it's here now and, in this exclusive review, we take a look at the Fujitsu Siemens Primergy RX330 S1 - the first rack server solution to market. Fujitsu Siemens has been coming on strong in the past 18 months, and its days of following the pack are well and truly gone. In 2006, it beat all the competition with its RX300 S3 (web ID: 92198) - the first Woodcrest dual-core Xeon server to market. With this, it beats them all again and by quite a margin.

The review system came equipped with a pair of 1.8GHz 2346 HE Opterons with a low TDP of 55W. These processors offer a wealth of new capabilities aimed at a range of applications - including server virtualisation - and feature improved power efficiency. AMD has firmly targeted the upgrade market, since it claims existing users can swap out their dual-core Opteron systems for the new quad cores without affecting power consumption and heat output. A smart idea, as this allows businesses to double their datacentre processor count in the greenest and most cost-effective way possible. In a UK exclusive, PC Pro ran the very first benchmarks on the Barcelona processors (web ID: 126845) and our power test results confirmed that it is, indeed, feasible to upgrade a dual-core system to quad-core at no extra power cost.

The RX330 S1 exhibits the typically tough build quality we've come to expect from Fujitsu Siemens. In terms of storage, you have room for up to six hard disks at the front, and the embedded LSI SAS controller allows you to mix and match SATA and SAS hard disks. The review system came with a quartet of 73GB Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 SAS drives, but it doesn't currently support SFF hard disks, which have a lower power consumption. The Xeon-equipped RX300 S3 does support SFF drives, so we'd expect this to be just a matter of time.

Underneath the easily removable

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lid you'll find clear access to key components and, although it's all tidy, it has a more industrial look to it than other Primergy servers. The three main cooling fans, for example, don't mate with any power connectors on the motherboard and have to be unplugged from their respective power cable before they can be removed. The motherboard also doesn't mate directly with the hard disk backplane, as the six SAS interfaces are individually cabled through. The two Opterons are located fore and aft on the motherboard and topped off with large passive heatsinks. The three fans provide all cooling for the chassis and drives without being noisy.

Expansion is handled by a removable cage to one side of the motherboard. This offers one PCI-E and two PCI-X slots, and the lower one is fitted with an LSI SAS 8300XL ZCR card, which commandeers the SAS channels and adds RAID5 support to the standard mix of mirrors and stripes. Power redundancy also gets a look in, as the server comes with a pair of 625W hot-swap units. To test power usage, we connected the server to an in-line power meter and, with Windows Server 2003 installed, we saw it drawing a modest 212W in idle. With SiSoft Sandra pushing all eight cores, we saw this rise to only 288W. To put this in perspective, in our review of the Broadberry 8014T-TB (web ID: 102310), we saw its quartet of dual-core Xeon MP processors suck up a whopping 680W when under pressure.

Management options are good, as the server has an embedded iRMC controller, which offers a dedicated Fast Ethernet port and a web browser interface, allowing the server to be accessed over IPMI. The RemoteView interface is tidy, offering high levels of access to the server. Basic remote control is provided, although this is only text based.

Standard server management is handled by the ServerView web interface, which provides a main console where you can access all servers that have the relevant agent installed. From here, you can monitor areas such as processor temperatures, fans and memory modules, while failures will cause alarms and alerts to be generated. The RAID Manager is another browser interface specifically for monitoring and managing the storage and controllers.

The main competition in the AMD server arena comes from HP, which expects to have quad-core servers available soon. For now, however, Fujitsu Siemens is the only option available and, as the first quad-core Opteron server to market, the RX330 S1 sets a high standard for the rest to follow.