Fujitsu Primergy TX150 S7 review

Fujitsu's latest pedestal server may be an entry-level solution for SMBs but it packs in a hardware specification that many larger businesses wouldn't turn their nose up at.

Energy efficiency is a high priority. The Primergy TX150 S7 sports the latest low-power Xeon L3426 and teams it up with single or dual 89% energy-efficient power supplies.

User maintenance is another key focus. Green "touch-points" are scattered throughout the server. An optional maintenance panel pops out from underneath the DVD drive that incorporates a LCD display and control pad, which can be used to view basic system operations and check for errors.

The front panel has separate covers for the upper expansion and lower drive bays that can be key-locked shut, which effectively blocks access to all bays and ports plus the side panel. Storage options are very impressive: the review system came with Fujitsu's eight-bay SFF option and six of the latest Toshiba 6Gbits/sec SAS drives.

Fujitsu offers a choice of SATA and SAS drives and if you want capacity over performance you can opt for a four-drive bay for larger 3.5in drives. The motherboard also has an embedded SATA controller with two separate ports plus a four-port connector, and supports mirrors and stripes.

Fujitsu has gone for the full storage monty in the review system. The price includes an LSI MegaRAID SAS 6G PCI Express card with both four-port interfaces wired directly to the drive backplane. The six drives were configured as a RAID5 array with global hot-standby but you can go for dual-drive redundant RAID6 as well. Even better, the price includes a full 512MB of cache memory and a battery backup pack mounted to the base of the chassis.

It comes with a single fixed 350W power supply, or you can opt for a pair of 450W hot-plug supplies. Our in-line meter recorded a power draw of 75W with Windows Server 2008 twiddling its thumbs. However, with SiSoft Sandra loading the Xeon processor we saw this peak at only 116W.

By comparison, both Boston's Green Power 1300-T and Broadberry's X34-104L also had L3426 Xeons and pulled only 80W and 83W under load. No doubt the six hard disks and 8GB of memory in the TX150 pushed consumption up, but the server's iRMC2 embedded management controller also offers power controls. With the minimum power setting enabled Sandra couldn't push the TX150 past 95W.