HP ProLiant DL360 G6 review

Dell's PowerEdge R610 bowled us over when we reviewed it, and since the DL360 G6 is its direct competitor it's going to need something special to further impress.

The DL360 supports Intel's new 5500 Series "Nehalem" processors. Representing an entirely new architecture, they introduce Intel's QPI (quick path interconnect) Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost technologies.

HP takes first blood in the storage department, as the DL360 supports up to eight SFF hard disks - the R610 has room for six. HP has also improved its RAID offerings since its old Smart Array P410 card has been replaced with an embedded P410i controller and a pair of four-port SAS interfaces on the motherboard. If you want the extra four drives you'll need a second backplane, which is cabled to the spare SAS port.

The system starts with no extra cache memory and supports stripes and mirrors, but the review unit included the 256MB cache module that fits in a dedicated slot and adds support for RAID5. An optional battery backup is available, and you can upgrade cache memory to 512MB.

The DL360 has a tidy interior with the two processor sockets and their attendant bank of nine DIMM sockets covered in a plastic shroud to improve airflow. Be careful if you remove this, we found it difficult to reposition.

In base models, cooling is handled by three hot-plug modules, each with a pair of dual-rotor fans. Adding the second processor requires a fourth module to be plugged in behind it. We were impressed with the low noise levels, putting the DL360 on a par with the R610 and its near-silent runnings.

Virtualisation is a high priority, and HP has included an SD memory card slot on the motherboard for booting embedded hypervisors. Dell has taken the same tack with the R610, but goes one step beyond with its Lifecycle Controller - an embedded chunk of NVRAM, which can be used to boot the server into Dell's UEFI interface.

Dell outdoes HP for network connections, as the DL360 has only two Gigabit ports whereas the R610 has a pair of embedded dual-port adapters. We were surprised to see PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports at the rear, making HP one of the last main vendors to still provide these. They're a waste of space and removing them would free up enough room for more network ports.

The DL360 supports two hot-plug supplies, and HP claims the DL360 and DL380 G6 are the only servers currently in the Energy Star program. HP's Thermal Logic uses up to 32 sensors to monitor power consumption, and the supplies share a common slot type so you can choose from three different outputs.

HP has done a good job in reducing power demands, with our inline power meter recording a draw of only 7W in standby and 100W with Windows Server 2003 R2 running in idle. With SiSoft Sandra maxing out all eight logical cores this peaked at a modest 157W.

HP's Insight Control server management tools are among the best on the market, and power is now a high priority. Functioning as a plugin to its Systems Insight Manager, the Insight Power Manager provides tools for monitoring and controlling power consumption and thermal output.

It was a tricky to set up, since the review server's iLO2 firmware had to be upgraded to support it, the Power Manager 2 Windows service had to be downloaded and installed, and then we had to license it and apply these to each server we wanted to control.

It's worth the effort, though, as the SIM interface is updated with tools showing graphs of power consumption, inlet air temperature and CPU performance. Add in values for temperature measurement, cost per kWh and a currency, and it will reveal a table of projected costs and potential savings.