Fujitsu Primergy RX300 S6 review

It's taken a while for the blue-chip server vendors to catch up with Intel's launch of its Xeon 5600 processors. Fujitsu is once again the first of the big four to deliver a product to our lab, and in this exclusive review we delve deeper into its new Primergy RX300 S6, which sports Intel's new six-core Xeon.

The Xeon 5600 series offers a choice of 12 processors ranging from the low-power, four-core 1.86GHz L5609 right up to the six-core 3.33GHz X5680. The review sample was supplied with a pair of 2.66GHz six-core X5650 Xeons, which sit in the middle of this family.

The RX300 S6 is aimed at a wide range of applications, with Fujitsu placing a priority on virtualisation duties. Memory is king in this space, and the server offers a total of 18 DIMM sockets supporting up to 192GB of ECC registered memory.

Memory redundancy looks good, as you can enable hot-sparing and mirroring, with the former requiring three identical DIMMs per channel. Memory mirroring requires two identical DIMMs per channel, splits available system memory in two, and duplicates data across each half.

Fujitsu has included an internal USB port for booting to an embedded hypervisor, but it can't match Dell in this area. The PowerEdge R710 supports both USB and SD card media, and for the latter Dell has enhanced its servers to include a pair of internal slots providing boot media redundancy.

The RX300's tool-free design is remarkably tidy, with easy access to major components. All removable parts have green touch-points, showing which items can be extracted by hand.

Cooling is handled by a row of five hot-swap fans fitted directly behind the processors. Fujitsu has reduced the chances of component failure or breakage: rather than use plugs, each fan power connector mates with surface-mounted contact points. The entire fan box can also be removed by pressing the touch-points on each side. The box actually has room for five more fans, but Fujitsu advised us these aren't required for this server.