HP ProLiant DL380 G5

By PCMag Staff

February 22, 2008

HP has had its ups and downs, but one thing the company has never screwed up is the ProLiant product line. These servers were the gold standard back when Compaq first engineered them, and HP has kept up that tradition in fine style. The HP ProLiant DL380 G5 that I tested performs well, has an almost totally modular design that makes maintenance simple, offers the best bundled administration software available, and allows plenty of expansion with the latest hardware. No surprise, then, that it came out on the top of the heap in this roundup of servers for small and midsize businesses.

Unpack the 2U machine and you'll quickly notice the hot-swap drive bay on the left side of the front bezel. Because HP, like Sun with its Sun Fire servers, moved to 2.5-inch serial-attached SCSI SAS drives, the box now has room for up to eight while retaining a 2U form factor. For our tests, HP set up a minimal drive configuration: four 72GB drives in a RAID 5 array for a total of just over 200GB, but the server could have handled up to eight 146GB SAS drives—just over a terabyte of internal storage. The company also could have opted for RAID 6 using its SmartArray 400 PCI-e controller. That would have added an extra layer of redundancy by requiring two spare drives in the array instead of just one, but HP said that most of its SMB customers still buy RAID 5, and that's the configuration that makes the most sense to me, too. RAID 6 allows for the simultaneous failure of two disks; I tend to think a better protection against that kind of catastrophe is an off-site backup.

The rest of the installed hardware reads like laundry list of current components: dual Intel quad-core X5365 3.0-GHz CPUs (the X5460 3.16-GHz CPUs became available shortly after testing started); 2GB of 667-MHz advanced ECC RAM (which I thought a tad anemic, since the box can handle up to 32GB, and even Aberdeen sent 4GB as requested); and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports that support TCP off-loading (good for those thinking about Windows Server 2008's new TCP/IP stack). The system also had five USB ports: two in front, two in back, and an internal one (which can let an admin, for example, securely boot into a hypervisor environment)—as well as two 1,000W redundant and hot-swappable power supplies. External KVM ports reside on the front and back of the case. All in all, you can tell that HP has spent years analyzing how servers live in racks.

Open the quick-remove top and you get an inkling of all that engineering: Everything that can be modular is—CPUs, the RAM bank, each individual fan and the entire fan assembly, the system battery, the power supplies, and the PCI riser cage. All pop in and out using only finger tabs and the occasional tug. On top of that, HP has added niceties like a plastic holder for the system battery with room for redundancy and a shape specifically designed to optimize airflow through the box. HP even designed the outside of the enclosure for ease of use in the form of the quick-deploy rail system, which slid easily into the APC InfrastruXure 19-inch test rack. This system also includes a cable-management arm that can work on either side of the rack, and quick-release levers.

Expansion capability is suitable for a server this size. You'll find eight RAM slots (so reaching the 32GB maximum will require 4GB DIMMs, though HP announced support for 8GB DIMMs while we were testing, bringing the total for the DL380 to 64GB in the near future). The motherboard has two PCIe slots with another three available on a riser assembly, which comes in two flavors: a board with room for one x4 PCI card accompanied by two x8 cards, or a configuration with a single x8 PCIe slot and two 64-bit PCI-X slots. If you change your mind after purchase, you can pop out the whole assembly and replace it in minutes.

My test system came with the slightly lower-cost all-PCIe option, with slot 2 on the motherboard empty and slot 1 occupied by an HP SmartArray 400 RAID controller configured with 512MB of cache. In all, the unit delivers a degree of hardware sophistication few competitors can rival, and if HP left it at that, the box would still be a good value for the money. But the company goes much further—in fit and finish, certainly, but especially in management.—

Sophisticated Management Software

The bundled management features are the most compelling reason to purchase this server. The embedded iLO2 chip (integrated Lights-Out), which runs its own Web interface off a power supply that's independent of the server's main power supplies, lets you check the machine's vitals even if the DL380 is powered off. The interface might once have been a bit arcane, but in recent years it's become very easy to use. A basic status screen covers the immediate health of the RAID controller, CPU, RAM, the power supplies, and more. You can drill down to info on individual components, view an iLO2-specific log file set, and kick off a basic diagnostic test suite to search for the root cause of a problem. The iLO2 interface even allows you to shut down or cycle the power.

Next to the iLO2's hardware utility is HP's System Insight Manager (SIM), which, in addition to supplying the software vision into the iLO2's hardware features, provides a host of other capabilities including operating system deployment, server migration, performance and diagnostic tools, vulnerability and patch management, and an iLO2-controlled power-management console that talks to onboard meters and power regulators so that you can configure the server to use only as much juice as it needs. You can access all of SIM's features via its Windows or Web-based GUIs, as well as through command-line scripting.

The server also comes with a single license of HP's Migration Manager. This amounts to a one-time license to migrate from your previous server, whatever the make or model, to your new ProLiant DL380. According to HP, this includes the operating system, any operating system settings that still apply on the new hardware platform, and, of course, all applications and data.

Performance was solid for a server with this hardware configuration. While it didn't outscore either the muscle-bound Aberdeen Stirling 229 or the Apple Xserve quad-core, remember that the ProLiant DL380 was using only dual quad-core 3.0-GHz X5365 CPUs with just 2GB of RAM, where the 229 had 3.2-GHz quad cores and twice the RAM, and the Apple, while also using only 3.0-GHz quad cores, had four times the RAM. With that in mind, the ProLiant DL380 did well on our 32-bit Geekbench system benchmark test, scoring an overall 6,730. That broke out into an CPU integer score of 8,934; a floating-point score of 8,852, and a memory score of 1,656—a good score considering the small RAM complement. In the real world this translates to how much work these CPUs can sustain—especially important in a server, since CPU horsepower must be divided between application needs and the number of users concurrently accessing the server. For SMB user counts, the DL380 G5 has plenty of horsepower, as these numbers show.

On our IOzone networked file system benchmark tests, the system kept pace on all cache-optimized runs, even against its more muscled competition, scoring 1.31 GBps on cache-optimized writes and 1.99 GBps on cache-optimized reads. However, it did trail the field slightly when we ratcheted IOzone to file sizes that canceled out the cache advantage, giving raw hardware results of 24.5 MBps on writes and 26.4 MBps on reads. Not slow by any means, but slightly behind even the dual-core Apple Xserve. File servers especially will get lots of hits on their disk subsystems, not just for local applications but for all your users looking to access files. The performance numbers that include disk caching will be the ones seen most often in the real world—that's why caching was invented, after all. But the test runs using 2GB files cancel out the cache advantage, which is really just a baseline hardware score.

With its tight form factor, excellent expansion capability, and near-total modularity, this server can provide hardware junkies with almost any fix imaginable. Couple that with a management platform that's been maturing for years (and the resulting polish shows), and the DL380 comes as close as any server I've seen to being all things to all people. It's slightly more expensive than most, placing second in the big-bucks category after the quad-core Apple Xserve—this even though the HP had less hardware muscle than the Aberdeen. But its quiet and flawless operation, solid performance numbers, and excellent management make it an overall better value than any other server here. This machine is highly recommended, and it earns our Editors' Choice.

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