Dell PowerEdge 860

Underneath the lid, everything looks neat and tidy, with all components easily accessible. The Xeon 3070 processor is fitted with a large passive heatsink and accompanied by a pair of large blower fans. Bearing in mind the target market, noise levels need to be kept to a minimum and, although the 860 isn't the quietest server on the block, it shouldn't be overly intrusive in a busy office environment. However, we did note that the expansion bays had no cooling provided, as the optional fan assembly wasn't fitted and the DRAC 4/P card became quite hot during testing.

Initially, the asking price for the review system looks a tad on the high side, but this does include a pair of 300GB SAS hard disks and the optional SAS 5i/r RAID controller. The drives are mounted in cold-swap carriers inside the chassis, but are quite accessible and can be easily removed by releasing a single retaining clip.

If you want more storage space and less performance, Dell offers a range of SATA drives, and if RAID isn't a requirement either the motherboard sports a pair of SATA interfaces as well. Dell has been quite nifty in the expansion department, since it has managed to squeeze both PCI-E and PCI-X slots onto one side of the riser card. It's achieved this with a simple motherboard redesign that's created a cut-out around the card-mounting area. Dell also offers a dual PCI-E slot riser card version at no extra cost.

The PowerEdge 860 is capable of satisfying a range of business requirements, as it can be customised with a variety of processing solutions, from a budget-priced Celeron right up to a quad-core Xeon. It supports basic low-cost SATA hard disks or high-performance SAS and RAID storage combos, and the management facilities are quite impressive for a supposedly entry-level system.

Author: Dave Mitchell