Broadberry CyberServe SR2625 review

In these times of financial uncertainty, many businesses are delaying upgrading their servers to save on costs. On the other hand, some are looking at cheaper alternatives to the big names. Broadberry’s latest CyberServe SR2625 has the latter group firmly in its sights, as it aims to offer a well-specified rack server package at a tempting price.

The SR2625 has a similar target market to HP’s ProLiant DL380 G6. Its 2U chassis offers a good combination of performance, storage capacity and expansion potential. Its foundation is Intel’s own Server System SR2625UR platform.

Storage capacity is above average, with eight hot-swap SAS/SATA drive bays that support the smaller SFF hard disks. Plus, the panel to the right can be removed to fit either a low-profile SATA tape drive or a cold-swap dual-drive disk bay. The standard control panel offers a set of status indicators, but you can upgrade this with Intel’s Local Control Panel, which adds an LCD screen and control pad for improved monitoring and server configuration.

RAID options include Intel’s active midplane, which incorporates an LSI RoC (RAID on Chip) controller and a mini-DIMM connector for cache memory. In its basic form this supports mirrors and stripes, but the hardware enablement key ups this to RAID5, 6, 50 and 60.

The price includes a quartet of Seagate’s latest 500GB Constellation 6Gbits/sec SAS drives, but Intel hasn’t yet updated the midplane to support speeds higher than 3Gbits/sec. Note the optional drive bays aren’t supported by the midplane, and must be wired to the motherboard’s embedded ports.

Under the lid you’ll find a tidy interior with good access to all major components. Cooling is handled by a bank of six hot-swap fans, and we found noise levels to be noticeably lower than those of the ProLiant DL180 G6.