Alotta Hardware For Your Buck!

This server has everything built in it that you could want for an affordable price. It has the cutting edge on technology that Compaq is known for with the bonus of their proven reliability and support. When we were first asked to look at these severs we jumped at the chance to beta test them. This machine is the replacement for the Compaq ProLiant 1600. Which for medium to small businesses is a great server.

The DL380 has hot-swappable disk drives along with a “built in to the motherboard” RAID controller which supports RAID Levels 1, 0+1, and 5. This is a bonus. No extra costs for a controller card. It works great with the (4) standard 1” hot-swappable drives and the optional (2) 1” drive cage.

The initial setup of this machine follows in Compaq’s standard easy form. Compaq provides a CD called SmartStart. This CD will help you setup your OS and configure the server including BIOS configuration, asset information and your controller card(s). The SmartStart disk also supports multiple OS’ including Microsoft, all versions up to 2K, and Novell.

When they were first released we purchased one of these servers for some old accounting software we acquired from a company we just picked up. Most of our network runs on Microsoft NT 4.0. This server was no different. We found that this server had all the horsepower to handle the accounting database plus much more.

This server does have some optional extras to make it somewhat redundant. It has dual power supplies, an extra NIC, and an additional RAID controller. I wouldn’t put any data on it that requires 24/7 uptime.

The expandability of it is limited also. It does have some, like the extra optional drive cage for (2) additional hot swap drives. It supports up to 933mhz PIII processor, which can be upgraded to dual processors. It has only 4 expansion slots, which if used correctly is more than enough to provide the limited redundancy that this box does have.

All in all this server is great for medium to small businesses. It can be useful in several different functions. For instance, as a small database server, mail server, file and print server, or a web server. I would not recommend that you put any critical data on it though. If you do, keep in mind that if the system fails for some reason, then there will be down time while the problem is corrected and the data restored.

Thank you all for reading and have a good night!