HP ProLiant DL360p Gen8 server review

HP has added a raft of improvements to its eighth generation 1U server. We take a look to see if the enhancements to the Sea of Sensors monitoring tool and increased automation capabilities are worth the £6000 asking price.

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Networking has been redesigned as the four embedded Gigabit ports on the DL360 G7 have been removed from the motherboard. In their place is a FlexLOM connector which accepts a variety of cards. We had the quad-Gigabit version but HP also offers a dual 10GbE version with 40GbE and Infiniband options on the way.

The review system came with a pair of 460W hot-plug power supplies and HP also offers 750W and 1200W options for heavier workloads. The server was supplied with dual 2GHz E5-2650 8-core Xeons and we found power consumption to be commendably low. With Windows Server 2008 R2 in idle we measured a draw of 92W. With the SiSoft Sandra benchmarking app pushing all 32 logical cores to maximum load we saw this rise to only 220W.

We could see and hear the iLO4 in action during testing as it regularly adjusted the fan speeds when the processors were under heavy load.

Overall

HP has pulled out all the stops with the DL360p Gen8 as it delivers a remarkable range innovative features. Design and build quality don't get any better and administrators will approve of the automated management and monitoring capabilities of the new iLO4 controller.

For these reasons we have no hesitation in giving the HP DL360p Gen8 an Editor's Choice award.

Verdict

The ProLiant DL360p Gen8 is well designed and packs a high-end specification into its compact 1U rack chassis. Storage potential is great as there is plenty of room to grow and HP’s new iLO4 controller cannot be beaten when it comes to management and monitoring features.

Chassis: 1U rack CPU: 2 x 2GHz Xeon E5-2650 Memory: 32GB 1600MHz DDR3 RDIMM expandable to 256GB (768GB with LR-DIMMs) Storage: 2 x 600GB HP 10k SAS hot-swap hard disks RAID: HP embedded Smart Array P420i SAS 2 with 2GB FBWC and capacitor Array support: RAID0, 1, 10, 5, 50, 6, 60 Expansion: 2 x PCI-e Gen3 slots Network: 4 x Gigabit FlexLOM Other: Internal USB port and SD card slot Power: 2 x 460W hot-plug supplies Management: HP iLO4 Standard with 10/100 Software: HP Insight Control software Warranty: 3yrs on site NBD

Dave Mitchell
Dave Mitchell

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.