Finding the best business servers can be key to growing your operation. SMBs and enterprises are all aware of the need to regularly invest in IT infrastructure to keep up with current and future demands, and getting the server purchase right is high on the list of priorities.
With on-premise servers, businesses can centralize multiple IT functions on a single platform and reduce their overall acquisition costs, boost productivity, and assure data availability and security.
However, picking the right server can be challenging. There are lots of options on the market, with servers that can handle a wide array of workloads, such as high-performance computing (HPC), application and database services, network storage, virtualization, and a whole lot more. Over the last 12 months, ITPro has tested and reviewed many servers and this guide features the best of the bunch.
Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specializing 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.
Best Business Servers 2024
Dell's PowerEdge R760 takes the honors for being the first production server through our lab doors to sport Intel’s fourth-generation Xeon Scalable chips and sets a high standard for the rest to follow. This powerful 2U rack server is aimed at a multitude of enterprise and data center workloads and the new chassis design offers an extensive range of storage options.
The standard chassis supports 12 LFF or 24 SFF front bays and there’s space at the back for a rear cage that adds a further 2 LFF or four SFF bays. Dell’s new tri-mode PERC 12 RAID controllers support SATA, SAS4, and Gen4 NVMe devices, and selecting the appropriate backplane means you can install up to 16 high-performance E3.S NVMe SSDs at the front and four more at the rear.
The R760 offers a high expansion potential which includes the latest PCIe Gen5 slots and there’s room for plenty of GPU cards as well. Remote management doesn’t get any better either, as the embedded iDRAC9 controller delivers a wealth of essential system information and it teams up with Dell’s OpenManage Enterprise, Power Manager, and CloudIQ infrastructure management services.
Price when reviewed: System as reviewed – £73,802 exc VAT
Read our full Dell PowerEdge R760 review for more information
The ProLiant DL360 Gen11 is the perfect rack-optimised server powerhouse. The slim-line 1U chassis sees a significant redesign over its five-year-old predecessor and a sharp focus on thermal capacity allows it to support all the latest Gen4 Xeon Scalable CPUs.
There’s plenty more as the server’s 32 DIMM slots accept up to 8TB of HPE’s DDR5 SmartMemory and it has a high expansion potential with room inside for three PCIe Gen 5 expansion slots and two OCP 3 mezzanine cards. Storage features are equally good as you can order chassis with a choice of LFF, SFF, NVMe U.3 SSDs and even have up to twenty E3.S EDSFF Gen5 NVMe SSDs in dual CPU configurations.
The DL360 Gen11 sports HPE’s latest iLO6 embedded controller which offers a wealth of remote management features and gives platform and supply chain security a high priority. Add in HPE’s GreenLake Compute Ops Management cloud services and you have an ideal candidate for data centers running rack-dense applications.
Price when reviewed: Starts from £2,200 exc VAT
Read our full HPE ProLiant DL360 Gen11 review for more information
Nobody does CPU core densities like AMD and Broadberry’s CyberServe EPYC EP1 112-4NVMe-G G4 show these attributes off to a tee. This single-socket 1U rack server can handle all the latest EPYC 9004 CPUs and Broadberry supplied our review system with AMD’s top-dog 96-core 2.4GHz EPYC 9654P CPU.
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There are no compromises on other key areas either. The server supports up to 3TB of fast DDR5 RDIMM memory and its high expansion capabilities are achieved with two Gen5 x16 PCIe slots and a pair of Gen5 OCP (Open Compute Project) bays that have the bandwidth to handle industry-standard 400GbE network mezzanine cards.
Even storage features are undiminished as the server’s backplane is ready for eight SATA SFF drives and four high-performance NVMe SSDs – and the price includes a quartet of 7.68TB Intel P5520 U.2 Gen4 NVMe read-intensive SSDs. All in all, an incredibly powerful rack server capable of taking on the most demanding workloads and delivering at a price the blue chips won’t have a hope of matching.
Price when reviewed: £22,504 exc VAT
Read our full Broadberry CyberServe EPYC EP1 112-4NVMe-G G4 review for more information
If versatility is a high priority Fujitsu’s Server Primergy RX2540 M7 won’t disappoint. This beautifully built 2U rack server is thermally rated for all Xeon Scalable Gen4 CPUs and can handle Xeon Max CPUs with up to 48 cores and their in-package high bandwidth memory.
The good news continues under the lid as it supports up to 8TB of DDR5 memory and has seven PCIe expansion slots plus an OCP mezzanine card bay. Graphics rendering is on Fujitsu’s menu too, as it’s designed to accept two double-width or six single-width Nvidia GPU cards.
It really shines in the storage department as along with chassis options for 12 LFF or 24 SFF drives and high-performance NVMe SSDs, you can install up to three dual-drive cages at the rear and increase capacity to 30 SFF drives. As a general-purpose data center workhorse, the Server Primergy RX2450 M7 is hard to beat as it delivers a quality set of features and a remarkable storage capacity all at a very good price.
Price when reviewed: RRP – £8,571 exc VAT
Read our full Fujitsu Server Primergy RX2540 M7 review for more information
When big data comes calling, Qsan’s XCubeSAN XS5326D is up to the storage challenge. This 2U rackmount hybrid Flash array is still the only one on the market to offer 26 SFF front bays and its monumental expansion capabilities support up to 546 drives and a maximum capacity of 16.7PB.
The XS5326D is an excellent value as its sub-£9K base price includes dual controllers running in active/active mode for fully transparent failover. Its drive bays support SAS3 HDD and SSD storage devices and the flexible expansion bays in each controller deliver combined IP SAN and FC SAN services.
Qsan impressed during our Fibre Channel lab tests as it returned cumulative Iometer throughput speeds of 16.4Gbits/sec and 1.1 million random read IOPS. Qsan can also claim five 9s reliability thanks to the array’s integral end-to-end hardware redundancy.
Price when reviewed: Diskless, £8,368 ex VAT
Read our full Qsan XCubeSAN XS5326D review for more information
