Broadberry CyberServe XE3-RS100 review

Storage redundancy is also on the cards, as the embedded LSI controller supports both stripes and mirrors in hardware. Although somewhat academic for this system, Intel’s Active Matrix technology adds software-managed RAID5 as well.

The XE3-RS100’s two Gigabit Ethernet ports can be placed in a load-balanced or failover team. There’s room for expansion via a riser card that provides a PCI Express x16 slot supporting a full height, half length card.

Optional remote management comes courtesy of Asus’s £65 ASMB5 controller. Plugging this little card into its dedicated slot activates a third port at the rear, so that management can be kept on a separate network.

The controller provides a tidy web browser interface where you can view all motherboard sensors for the server’s critical components. Full control over power allows the server to be remotely switched on and off, or reset.

Usefully, KVM over IP control and virtual media come as standard features, so you can remotely control the server and define devices on the system running the browser as virtual boot media.

Broadberry has equipped its chassis with a small 220W fixed power supply with 80 Plus compliance: that means it’s certified as highly energy efficient at 20, 50 and 100% of its rated load. Combined with the low-power processor and efficient SFF hard disks, this made for some remarkably low energy readings in our tests.

With the server hooked up to our inline power meter we recorded a draw of only 24W with Windows Server 2008 R2 in idle. Using the benchmark application SiSoft Sandra to push all four of the Xeon E3-1220L processor’s logical cores to maximum load, we measured a peak reading of 46W, a lower power draw than any other standard server we’ve had in the lab.

The Broadberry CyberServe XE3-RS100 may be only a basic rack server, but for such a low price its hardware specification is an extremely reasonable one. And as a small office general purpose server or ultra-low-power compute node, its combination of low noise emission and minimal power consumption makes it a promising value choice.