HP ProLiant DL585 G7 review

The review system included 1GB of HP's flash-backed write cache and the battery backup pack. The P410i supports mirrors, stripes and RAID5 as standard, and adding an advanced licence pack brings RAID6 into the storage equation.

The SPI board presents a quartet of Gigabit ports at the rear and an expansion slot for HP's dual-port 10-Gigabit SFP module. It also features HP's new iLO3 remote management controller, providing a dedicated Fast Ethernet port for management access and pairs of USB and PS/2 ports too.

Virtualisation is well catered for, with the system board offering two internal USB ports and an embedded SD memory card slot on the SPI board. You can add a SATA DVD drive at the front; the system board has the interface cable ready and waiting for it.

The DL585 G7 excels when it comes to expansion: there are five available PCI Express slots, all supporting full-height, full-length cards. There's room to add an extra I/O expansion board and HP offers options with six more PCI Express slots or a mixture of these and PCI Extended.

For power redundancy, the DL585 G7 includes four 1,200W hot-plug modules: it did well in our power tests, with its four 2.1GHz 6172 Opterons pulling 356W in idle and peaking at 710W with SiSoft Sandra. This compares favourably with Dell's R815, which drew 335W in idle and 618W under load. This had four 2.2GHz AMD 6174 Opterons, 64GB of memory and only two 1,023W power supplies.

Gateway's GR585 F1 drew 159W in idle and 328W under load, but it's difficult to compare as our review system had only one 1,400W supply plus two processors. Doubling the numbers does show the DL585's monster hardware package isn't overly greedy, though.

The choices for 4P servers using AMD's Opteron 6100 processors seem clear cut. If price is top priority then Gateway's GR585 F1 offers the best value package. In Dell's PowerEdge R815 you have high rack-cabinet processing density, good support for virtualisation and decent remote management features. Although the DL585 G7 is the most expensive, it suits businesses looking for a server consolidation and virtualisation platform with massive expansion potential, the best remote management tools and good storage options.

Author: Dave Mitchell