Fujitsu Primergy RX100 S7 review

The price also includes the Advanced iRMC S3 upgrade, which activates KVM over IP remote control and virtual media features. These allow you to remotely control the server, access its BIOS menus or OS, and present devices on other hosts as boot media.

For general systems management, Fujitsu’s provides its ServerView Suite software that focuses purely on server management. The ServerList option allows you to view all servers with the ServerView agent installed, and provides a listing of hardware components along with their status and more graphs of ongoing power consumption.

Internally, the server is well built, with a reassuringly solid feel. The dual power supply model has five small cooling fans in front of the motherboard. The front panel and drive carriers use Fujitsu’s Cool-safe honeycomb design to improve airflow. It works extremely well in the real world; this server is one of the quietest 1U systems we’ve tested.

The review system includes a 3.3GHz Intel Xeon E3-1240 processor, but you have choices. Fujitsu offers a total of seven Xeon E3 models, plus cheaper Core i3 and Pentium G620 processors if you want to cut costs.

For such a compact chassis, the RX100 has very good expansion potential. The RAID card takes up one of a pair of PCI Express slots, but there’s another riser with room for a third half-length, half-height PCI Express card.

The system came with two 450W hotplug power supplies and we found consumption low. Our in-line meter measured a draw of 60W with Windows Server 2008 R2 in idle, and with SiSoft Sandra maxing out the eight logical processor cores, it peaked at 142W.

The main competitor is Dell’s PowerEdge R210 II, and although our review system looks expensive, that’s Fujitsu’s RRP – it is cheaper at retail. Consequently, there’s little between the two on price and performance, but Fujitsu wins for its design, remote management and expansion potential.