Fujitsu Primergy RX200 S5 review

Fujitsu's latest 1U rack server has a keen eye on energy efficiency and cooling in the datacenter, with the latter addressed by the company's Cool-safe technology. A glance at the front of the RX200 S5 reveals the new honeycomb design.

The design extends to the interior, and Fujitsu has used thermal imaging to redesign the airflow channels to ensure there are no hotspots. This allows airflow to be reduced to cut noise levels. Note, though, that the RX200 supports only smaller SFF SAS/SATA hard disks, with room for eight at the front.

The RX200 S5 is also part of Fujitsu's new "My very first VMware" initiative, which aims to give SMBs a leg up into the virtualisation club. The server is offered as part of a bundle that includes the new Eternus DX60 storage array and VMware's vSphere 4 Essentials Plus.

Fujitsu hasn't taken the same route for virtualisation as Dell or HP. Instead of an SD memory card slot, the RX200 has a proprietary motherboard connector. This accepts an optional USB SSD card, with ESX 4i preinstalled.

The front panel on the review system came packed with six 147GB Fujitsu SAS SFF drives and has the optical drive option installed. If you want eight drives, the latter needs to be taken out.

RAID is handled by an LSI SAS8880E PCI Express card cabled directly to the hard disk backplane. It comes with a healthy 512MB of embedded cache and Fujitsu offers an optional battery backup pack, which slots neatly into a holder in front of the power distribution unit.

Expansion options look good: there's a RAID card in the front PCI Express expansion slot, plus two more at the back. The server comes with a pair of embedded Gigabit ports, but this can be increased for virtualisation duties with extra dual- and quad-port network cards.