HP ProLiant DL100 Storage Server review

Dave Mitchell Read more October 7, 2009

£2868

Price when reviewed

HP’s latest NAS appliance targets the storage demands of small offices and branches and gives SCSI a kick in the teeth by using SATA (Serial ATA) storage. Realistically, for NAS and entry-level server applications there’s nothing significant to be gained from using SCSI, as it can’t match the price/capacity/performance ratio of SATA. Consequently, for a reasonable outlay you get a decent 1TB of network storage with full hardware RAID protection into the bargain.

The DL100 is well built, with the quartet of Maxtor drives arranged across the front and mounted in sturdy hot-swap carriers. Underneath the easily removed lid, a tidy interior awaits and the hard disk backplane power and SATA cabling has been tucked neatly out of the way. The simple motherboard is equipped with a single 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor accompanied by 1GB of PC3200 memory, while a large plastic duct covers all major components for improved airflow. General cooling is handled by a pair of small radial fans, while a larger blower fan looks after the processor, although the comparatively high operational noise levels make the DL100 unsuitable for location in a normal office environment.

The motherboard has been cut away at the rear to allow a riser card with two PCI slots to be fitted. You get 64-bit and 32-bit slots, and these have been put to good use as they’re home to a four-port Adaptec SATA RAID controller, while an Adaptec Ultra160 SCSI card provides a pair of ports for connecting external devices such as tape drives for local backup. A pair of embedded Intel gigabit Ethernet adaptors completes the network picture . However, we did suffer from dej vu during the review and a quick investigation confirmed that the DL100 bears a quite remarkable physical resemblance to Dell’s PowerVault 745N NAS appliance.

You get Windows Storage Server 2003 (SS2003) at the helm, although this can’t function as a domain controller nor is it capable of running large applications or services. Installation is simple enough. You point a browser at the appliance for secure remote access where you’ll be presented with the standard SS2003 interface and a rapid Startup Wizard, which helps set up network, SNMP and email alerting parameters for detected hardware faults. There are plenty of storage management tools as all access is controlled with local or domain users and groups. You can also apply a range of passive or active disk quotas. Naturally, you get the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), which takes up to 512 snapshots of selected volumes, but also included is VSS for Shared Folders. This extends the VSS feature to the user level as it reserves 64 snapshots for use over SMB or NFS file shares. Only Windows XP and 2000 clients are supported, but HP provides the necessary client-side utility on the appliance, which allows users to access the snapshots and view and restore earlier versions of their own files.

Seeing as the DL100 is so similar to Dell’s PowerVault 745N, a direct comparison is justified. Price-wise, for the same specification, there’s virtually nothing between them. The only significant differences being that Dell offers a better warranty for the same money, while HP supports integration with its Data Protector backup software and options for appliance mirroring plus an iSCSI plug-in.