Gateway GR360 F1 review

Gateway offers a good mix of Flex I/O cards: along with dual and quad-port Gigabit options, you have an SAS card that you'll need if you want to use all eight drive bays. This sports a pair of four-port SAS interfaces, adds support for RAID6 arrays, and comes with 256MB of embedded cache.

The GR360 F1 is well built, although push-buttons on the lid make it difficult to remove without some screwdriver-related persuasion. However, the interior is tidy, with good access to components.

The server supports Xeon 5500 and 5600 processors, and the two banks of nine DIMM sockets mean you can go up to 192GB using DDR3 ECC-registered memory modules. Cooling is handled by a bank of six cold-swap fans in front, and although noise levels aren't overly intrusive, they're higher than that emitted by the ProLiant DL360 G6.

The GR360 beats HP for network connections since it has twice as many embedded Gigabit ports. It also matches it for power redundancy, as it supports a pair of hot-plug supplies.

The Gateway is also easy on the power supply: we measured the server drawing 93W with Server 2008 R2 in idle and 147W with SiSoft Sandra maxing out the eight logical processor cores. A DL360 G6 with an almost identical specification drew 100W and 157W in the same power tests.

For remote management, the server has an embedded RMM chip and dedicated network port. This offers a neat web interface, allowing you to remotely control the server and access its power supplies directly to turn it on and off, reset it or close down its OS.

You can view details about all critical components and use LDAP and RADIUS servers to authenticate remote access. The RMM features aren't as sophisticated as HP's iLO2 chip, but they do work well and include KVM over IP remote control as standard.

Gateway's server deployment tools won't beat Dell's Lifecycle Controller, but its bootable Smart Setup disc does offer some useful utilities. These can be used to install an OS, configure the remote management controller, create RAID arrays and clone system configurations for use with multiple servers.

A glance at the PC Pro A List shows our favourite 1U rack server is still Dell's PowerEdge R610 (see p32). Gateway's GR360 F1 doesn't have enough flair to push this off the list, but it does put up strong competition to HP's DL360 G6 and offers far better value. DAVE MITCHELL

Author: Dave Mitchell