IBM eServer xSeries 225

Server management comes courtesy of IBM's Director, which is its standard software platform for all its workstations, laptops and servers. It requires an agent loaded locally and offers a good range of tools for local and remote monitoring of critical system components. It provides plenty of operational information about the various hardware components and, if an error or failure is detected, there's a huge selection of event actions available, with options to send alerts by email, network broadcast, SNMP trap and even a posting to a newsgroup of your choice. The ServeRAID utility can be used to configure and monitor the LSI Logic chipset from within Windows, but alerting is more limited, as it's only capable of sounding an audible alarm.

The xSeries 225 certainly packs a punch with a fine specification, although the quintet of hard disks does put the cost up significantly, as these alone add £1,025 to the asking price. However, you're getting exemplary build quality and, although the LSI SCSI chipset isn't usually suited to systems with a single hard disk backplane, you could always opt for a ZCR card instead, which will provide the full complement of RAID options.