Boston Value Series 380 G8 review

Supermicro has always been quick to support the latest technology from Intel, so it’s no surprise it was one of the first to rush through our doors with a Xeon E5 system. Supplied exclusively by Boston, the Value Series (VS) 380 G8 aims to combine the power of the processors with high memory and storage capacity.

It’s clear from the spec that Boston is targeting this directly against HP’s eighth-generation ProLiant DL380. However, we can’t yet compare as the latter won’t be available until April at the earliest.

Built around a Supermicro X9DRi-LN4F+ motherboard, the VS 380 G8 supports all Xeon E5-2600 series processors, and the price includes a pair of 2.6GHz E5-2670 Xeons. These eight-core modules are in the upper levels of the Xeon E5 family and have a 20MB L3 cache, run at the maximum QPI speed of 8GT/sec and support both Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost.

The motherboard has 24 DIMM sockets and supports up to 768GB. The system on review includes 32GB of memory spread across eight 4GB DIMMs, and Boston offers a choice of standard 1.5V and low-voltage 1.35V DIMMs.

The solidly built 2U chassis hits the spot for storage features, with a front panel that has room for up to 12 LFF hard disks in hot-swap carriers. The motherboard’s embedded controller provides two SATA III and four SATA II onboard interfaces, and supports mirrors, stripes and RAID5 in Windows; the Boston, however, doesn’t make use of it, using a Supermicro SAS SMC2108 RAID PCI Express card instead.

It has also fitted a SAS 2/SATA III backplane: combining its SAS expanders with the RAID card brings all 12 drive bays into play, adding RAID6 and 60 to the possibilities. For our review sample, Boston focused on price and storage capacity rather than performance, so the server came with four 1TB Western Digital RE4 Enterprise SATA II drives.

Internal design is good, with plenty of access. The processors and memory sockets are covered by a plastic shroud, and all cooling is managed by three hotplug fans behind the disk backplane, which don’t generate much noise.

There are lots of network connections, too. Four Gigabit ports are embedded on the motherboard, and there’s plenty of room to add more. Even with the RAID card installed, there are still five PCI Express Gen 3 slots of various speeds to play with.

The VS 380 G8 isn’t great for virtualisation as there’s only an internal USB port for booting into a hypervisor. It does, however, have an onboard power connector next to its SATA ports specifically for a SATA DOM, so it could run apps such as the Open-E data storage software for NAS, iSCSI and FC SAN services.

Supermicro provides remote management with its embedded RMM chip, which adds a dedicated 10/100 Ethernet port at the rear. The web interface is basic when compared to Dell’s iDRAC7 and HP’s iLO 3, however, and it’s time Supermicro stepped into line and added power-usage monitoring and graphing features.

It does at least provide direct access to the power supplies for turning the server on or off, or rebooting. There are views of a wide range of sensors for critical components, which can be linked to email and SNMP alerts. And, unlike Dell and HP, it includes KVM over IP remote control and virtual media services as standard.

For power redundancy, the price includes a pair of 920W hotplug supplies, and the VS 380 G8 also scored well in our tests, drawing 162W in idle and peaking at 349W under extreme load.

Boston’s VS 380 G8 is a good-value package, with plenty of hardware redundancy. It comes with a pair of high-end Xeon E5 processors, and its 12 disk bays and support for SAS 2 and SATA III hard disks make it a solid choice as a high-power storage server.

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