Boston Green Power 1300-T review

Intel’s new Series 3400 Xeon processors are popular choices for reducing server power consumption. In our exclusive review of the GP M100 pedestal server, we saw Boston deliver a first look at this uni-socket processor, and with the Green Power 1300-T it turns its attention to rack applications.

The server sports a 1.86GHz L3426 Xeon, which delivers a much lower TDP of 45W than other members of the 3400 family, which are rated at 95W. The L3426 supports Intel’s Hyper-Threading and Turbo-Boost technologies – with the latter, if only one physical core in the L3426 is being used, the clock rate can be boosted by nearly 75% to 3.2GHz.

A chassis depth of about 22in means the 1300-T will slot easily into most rack cabinets, and it offers good storage potential with the inclusion of eight SFF drive bays and three 500GB Hitachi SATA drives preconfigured in a RAID5 array.

Despite the wealth of hot-swap bays, there’s still room for a DVD drive. Along with power and a recessed reset button, a panel sits to the right with status LEDs for disk and network activity and fault notification. The UID (unit identifier) button should light up LEDs fore and aft, but on the 1300-T it seemed to turn off the disk activity LED when pressed.

Supermicro has been busy improving its remote management offerings, and most of its motherboards now come with a dedicated network port and embedded RMM as standard. The 1300-T is no exception, as the server can be accessed remotely via a web browser, which provides a tidy interface with plenty of operational information.

You can keep an eye on a range of sensors for critical components and link thresholds with issuing SNMP traps and email alerts if any problems are spotted or thresholds breached. You have full control over the power supply so you can switch the server on and off, reset it and initiate a graceful shutdown.

User access controls are excellent, as you can use LDAP or RADIUS servers for external authentication to the remote controller. KVM-over-IP allows you to access the BIOS setup menu and OS remotely. Virtual media is also on the menu, and it’s worth noting that all the blue chips only offer these two features as chargeable options.