Product Reviews

The arrival of the Primergy TX300 S2 into the Enterprise test labs neatly ties up a few loose ends. Fujitsu Siemens is the last blue-chip server manufacturer to send us an example of its support for Intel's EM64T technology. The company advised us that the main reason for the delay was that, rather than rush products out with the rest, its design team wanted to make sure it got a number of internal features right first time.

Build quality is good. The TX300 looks and feels extremely sturdy. Along with the pedestal version on review, the chassis supports rack mounting, but this is a long, lean processing machine with a depth of over 700mm, so make sure your rack cabinet has sufficient room for it. Storage choices are plentiful, though. The front panel offers a large hot-swap bay with room for six hard disks, and the price includes a pair of 73.5GB Ultra320 hard disks. General expansion options initially look bleak, as one 5.25in bay has been commandeered to improve chassis airflow. However, the third is occupied by a neat module comprising a floppy drive and low-profile DVD-ROM, leaving two spare bays. Chassis security is good, as the two front sliding panels can be locked in place, preventing access to all devices. The side panel can also be locked, and intrusion-detection switches are located on both the front and side of the chassis.

With the side panel removed, it's obvious where Fujitsu Siemens has put most thought, as cooling is exemplary. The motherboard sports a pair of 3.6GHz Xeon Nocona modules fitted with the most powerful heatsinks we've ever seen. Each processor is covered by a metal plate with a tidy matrix of copper heatpipes attached, which disappear into large heatsinks some two inches above them. Fujitsu Siemens advised us that the pipes are filled with a secret fluid that improves heat dissipation. Six fans in three groups are provided, with one pair looking after the processors, another managing the hard disk bay and general chassis cooling, and the third handling the memory and motherboard chipsets. All the fans are hot-swappable, and a smart touch is the use of simple, spring-loaded contacts rather than mating sockets for power and monitoring. Two plastic

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shrouds also help with routing, and one ensures that the air from the clear 5.25in bay services the processors. The company has also been working on reducing noise levels. After the power-up sequence, the fans settle down to a pleasant hum.

With an Intel E7520 chipset in residence, DDR2 memory is the order of the day, and the price includes a pair of 1GB modules. PCI Express is conspicuous by its absence, but in its place there are five PCI-X slots; the top two support hot-plug cards and come equipped with support trays to aid removal and refitting. The lack of PCI Express isn't a major issue at the moment, as business applications for this technology are likely to be Infiniband and 10-gigabit Ethernet, which currently have no practical use in this level of server. An LSI chipset provides standard Ultra320 SCSI services, but it also adds basic RAID functions with support for mirrored arrays to protect the boot disk. For increased fault tolerance, Fujitsu Siemens has taken a leaf out of Dell's book by offering a ROMB (RAID on motherboard) option. A hardware key activates this function, which uses the onboard SCSI channels to deliver support for RAID0, 1, 10, 5 and 50 arrays. You can add a DIMM module for cache memory or use the full MegaRAID module, which comes with 128MB or 256MB of cache memory and a battery backup pack.

General start-up assistance is provided by the ServerStart utility, while ServerView provides an SNMP interface from which you can access all systems on the network that have the relevant agents installed. From the main interface, it's possible to monitor areas such as processor temperatures, power supplies, fans and expansion cards. Failures will cause alarms to be generated that can be tied to notifications by email, network message or pager. The power settings may be remotely accessed so server power cycles can be scheduled, and a watchdog timer is able to reboot the server if no activity is detected for a specified time. The new Web Extensions bring server monitoring up to date, as ServerView can now be accessed remotely via a browser, where it provides all the same features along with secure access over HTTPS. LSI's GAM (global array manager) is probably the weakest link. Although this utility provides reasonable levels of information about the physical and logical disk layout, it has only recently been updated to support disk-failure alerting via pager, fax, email and running an application.

The Primergy range of servers has seen steady improvements, not least in build quality, and the TX300 S2 is a fine example. Remote management tools aren't as sophisticated as HP's, but it offers a better specification than the ML350 G4 for a little more cash, making this a good choice for SMEs looking to upgrade their IT services.