System cooling is handled by four large fans located between the trays and the backplane. They aren't hot-swappable and each pair can only be removed when the lower trays have been released and pushed back slightly. With the Atom's staying frosty the fans don't need to shift much air and we found the server to be surprisingly quiet even when under heavy load.
The mounting brackets on the chassis have integral power buttons so you can control each server individually. They also provide a basic set of status LEDs for power and the network ports. The trays are easy to remove as you release the locking tabs on each side of them and pull the unit out from the rear with the two grab rings.
Remote management is possible since each server has an embedded Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) controller which shares access with the first Gigabit Ethernet NIC. This offers a tidy web interface providing full access to the server so you can switch it on and off, reset it and initiate a graceful shutdown.
The web interface provides sensor readouts for all critical components and you can issue SNMP traps and email alerts using thresholds for each sensor. You're going to need full remote control for this system and thankfully it comes as standard.
The remote control came in very handy for us during our power tests as we could control all eight nodes from one workstation.
It also provides virtual media services so devices on the host PC, such as optical drives, can be used by the server under control. We found the KVM-over-IP feature particularly useful as we could remotely control all eight nodes from one workstation during our power tests.
