HP Proliant DL380p Gen8 Server

Pros Excellent performance in testing. Sophisticated HDD monitoring and diagnostics. Smart socket guide protects processor from damage during installation. Server warns which drives not to pull during disaster recovery.

Cons Expensive. Deafening in high performance mode. Bottom Line If you are looking for an SMB server that absolutely must handle the most demanding database transactions or outrageous amounts of I/O requests, the HP Proliant DL380p Gen 8 server will do nicely, and, for smaller organizations, even a lower-cost configuration can handle demanding server tasks or house several virtual servers.

By Samara Lynn

HP's Proliant line of servers is in its eighth generation. These servers have become fixtures in SMB datacenters. The latest entry, the DL380p ($2,659–$14,000) is a beast of a machine. Not only can you completely trick it out spec-wise for maximum performance, but it also offers a ton of management and control options. It's the fastest server we've tested, and that's thanks to the expensive configuration HP sent us for testing—an over $14,000 piece of iron. However, even a lower-spec configuration will deliver the performance and reliability that SMBs still need from a server.

Specs
As mentioned, this server shipped to us fully loaded. It has dual Intel Xeon E5-2690 (2.9GHz) processors—with a total of 16 cores. RAM is 128GB DDR3-1600 and storage is comprised of eight 300GB 6G SAS 10K rpm SFF 2.5-inch disks. It's a 2U rack mount server that ships with a small-form-factor ball bearing rail kit. It's a bigger machine than the comparable Dell PowerEdge R420. Disks are configured in two logical drives with RAID 5.

The unit has four GB Ethernet ports, six expansion ports, six USB ports, and shipped with dual power supplies.

There are a few new physical features that HP reps say were customer-inspired. One is clear baffles over the processors and other components, which give you a view of these components. You can easily remove the baffles and access the parts for replacing or upgrading.

PCI risers lift off the system board without any hassle for simple PCI card expansion. There are two other new features I find extremely useful: flat cabling—which keep the inside of the server neat and easy to move around in, and a smart socket guide. This guide reduces the amount of handling you have to do of an actual processor during installation and also makes it easy to correctly seat the processor into the socket. This is ideal, because the processor's pins are delicate and can bend if the component is handled too roughly.

The new FlexibleLOM (LAN on motherboard) feature means you can have your server initially configured with standard Gigabit Ethernet ports only and then easily upgrade to 10 GBe, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, converged networking, or other network connectivity options.

The new SmartDrive feature makes use of tray carriers that only fit SmartDrive-supported hard drives—these drive carriers don't fit into legacy Proliant servers. This is because they are engineered to work with the new SmartDrive capability. The new carrier design also allows double the storage of previous Proliant models.

With SmartDrive, each drive carrier has an LED that will tell you what is going on with the drive— imminent failure or a RAID array rebuild, for examples. There is an additional LED that will light up in the event a RAID array has to be created. This LED tells a server administrator which drive not to hot-swap to rebuild the array. Removing the drive during a rebuild or restore operation can mean a server recovery failure.

The only down side to the SmartDrive LED indicators is that there can be an awful lot of light blinking that looks like major disk activity—even when the server is pretty idle. The drive LEDs spin whenever a drive has an outstanding command. It's a niggle, but it kept raising my blood pressure: to me, that amount of flashing lights means a problem.

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