Fujitsu Primergy TX150 S8 review

Mono-socket Xeon E5 servers are ideal for small businesses that want a more powerful alternative to Xeon E3 systems, but there aren’t a huge number of options on the market.

Dell’s PowerEdge T320 is one of the few we’ve seen, and its combination of value and features was enough to earn it a Recommended award. Now, in this exclusive review, we look at Fujitsu’s alternative – the Primergy TX150 S8.

This chunky, well-built pedestal server supports a single Xeon E5-2400 CPU, but costs can be cut by plumping for a cheaper E5-1400. Our review system featured a 1.9GHz E5-2420, which is the entry point for Intel’s E5-2400 family.

This six-core CPU has a 15MB L3 cache and a 7.2GT/sec QPI, supports Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost, and can handle memory speeds of up to 1,333MHz. The price also includes 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and the server’s six DIMM sockets support a maximum of 96GB.

The TX150 easily matches the Dell PowerEdge T320 in the storage department. As standard, the base system is supplied with a four-bay LFF hot-swap cage, which can be augmented with a second four-bay cage that replaces the upper 5.25in bays. Alternatively, you can opt for models equipped with eight or 16 SFF hot-swap drives.

RAID options are similar to the Dell’s. The Fujitsu’s C602 chipset supports four SATA drives and RAID stripes or mirrors. Fujitsu’s optional Patsburg Upgrade Kit (£71 exc VAT) adds support for SAS drives, but you still have the same choice of RAID levels.

For more than four hard disks, it’s necessary to add one of Fujitsu’s RAID PCI Express cards. They’re all based on an LSI MegaRAID chip and support configurations up to RAID6, and you can choose from 512MB or 1GB of cache, plus battery or Flash backup.

The TX150 isn’t the best choice for virtualisation duties, since it doesn’t have any internal USB ports for booting into a hypervisor. The T320, on the other hand, accepts Dell’s dual SD card controller, which provides automatic hypervisor redundancy.

Power options start with a cabled 500W power supply, but our review system came with a single 450W hotplug module. A second hotplug bay is ready, and an extra 450W PSU costs around £205 exc VAT. Note that the four-bay cabled version of the T320 doesn’t support redundant power supplies.