Gateway GT110 F2 review

After a slow start earlier this year, we’ve seen a recent flurry of Xeon E3 entry-level servers from Dell, HP and Fujitsu – and now we can add Gateway to that list. Its compact GT110 F2 is aimed at small businesses looking for a low-cost first server, but also at larger companies wanting to deploy local IT services in their remote or branch offices.

Price-wise, there isn’t a huge difference between this server and Dell’s PowerEdge T110 II. The configuration on review here costs £580 exc VAT; a quick trip to Dell’s configuration site gave us a price of £540 for the same specification.

The GT110 F2 is well built, with a solid metal chassis that’s slightly smaller than that of the Dell T110 II. There’s room at the front for a couple of 5.25in devices, and the price above includes one SATA DVD-RW drive. The second bay can be used for a backup device, and Gateway offers a range of internal SAS LTO Ultrium and USB DAT tape drives as options. Smaller businesses set on tape for backup would be better off opting for the HP StorageWorks DAT 320, which has a decent capacity and better speeds than the DAT 160 and the elderly DAT 72. The LTO option is expensive and requires an additional SAS adapter card.

Gateway doesn’t produce its own motherboards, so for the GT110 F2 it’s settled on a Gigabyte GA-6UASL1 server-class board, which offers virtually the same feature set as that in the Dell T110 II. It can handle up to 32GB of unbuffered DDR3 memory; our system came with a pair of 2GB modules, leaving room for later upgrades.

It supports both Intel Xeon E3 and Core i3 processors, and Gateway currently offers eight of the former and three of the latter as options. Our review configuration came fitted with a 3.3GHz Xeon E3-1240, but you can save cash and choose a slower processor if the server will be used for only light duties.

You can also save with the OS, since Gateway offers a reseller option kit (ROK) for Windows Server 2008 R2 Foundation. This costs an additional £148 and supports up to 15 Windows user accounts.