IBM eServer 325 review

Whereas HP has unreservedly supported AMD's Opteron with both quad- and dual-processor rack-server variants, IBM has taken a more cautious line. Aimed at precisely the same market as HP's ProLiant DL145, the eServer 325 currently represents AMD's only appearance in IBM's extensive server line-up. It delivers support for dual Opterons in a slimline 1U package.

At this end of the server market, IBM stopped manufacturing its own motherboards some time ago and in most cases has settled on MSI as its main supplier. However, for the 325 it has opted for an even simpler solution by taking MSI's K1-1000S v2.0A rack-server package and adding its name to the front. This is no bad thing, as HP did exactly the same thing by rebadging AMD's own Serenade rack solution for its ProLiant DL145. MSI's 1U chassis is just as well built and the MS-9145 motherboard offers a number of useful features. A floppy drive is absent, but the front panel is home to a low-profile 24x CD-ROM and there's room for a couple of hard disk bays to one side. The server does offer hot-swap SCSI capabilities but our review model was supplied with a single 80GB Seagate ATA/100 hard disk.

All is present and correct internally and the tidy design will make upgrades and maintenance simple affairs. Five cooling fans are spread across the front of the motherboard, and we found operational noise levels a lot lower than those emitted by the Gigabyte server from Rackservers.com (see p182). The Opteron processors are staggered down the board and accompanied by small ducts to channel air flow through their passive heatsinks. Storage in the review system isn't particularly exciting, although the resident Ultra320 SCSI chipset can be used instead. It only provides a single channel located on the edge of the motherboard near to the drive bays but does support RAID1 mirroring along with hot-swap capabilities.

Expansion options are good. The space behind the power supply has been kept clear for a small riser card offering 133MHz full-height and 100MHz half-height PCI-X slots. A duo of integrated Broadcom NetXtreme gigabit adaptors handle the network connection, and these can be teamed together for fault-tolerant or load-balanced links. To achieve this, you must install the Advanced Control Suite utility, and IBM is strangely one of very few server vendors to actually supply this essential tool with its software bundle.

IBM didn't deliver the system with an OS pre-installed, so we tried out its ServerGuide utility. This gets things off to a flying start as the bootable CD-ROM offers to lead you through setting up the hard disks, creating a system partition, installing drivers and loading your chosen OS. Server management comes courtesy of IBM's Director, which is its standard software platform for all its workstations, laptops and servers. It requires a Director agent or the standard SNMP service loaded locally and offers a good range of tools for local and remote monitoring of critical system components. It's not as slick as HP's Insight Manager, but it does provide plenty of operational information about the various hardware components. The simple three-pane interface displays all manageable systems in the centre and you can pick a task to the right and run it simply using drag and drop. The server can be remotely controlled from a system running the console component, and a detailed hardware inventory of systems with the Director agent loaded is also provided. 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.