HPE ProLiant DL345 Gen11 review: An incredibly versatile 1P rack server at a very tempting price

HPE's ProLiant DL345 Gen11 is a 2U single-socket (1P) rack server with a few surprises up its sleeve. Along with support for AMD's core-heavy Gen4 EPYC CPUs plus fast DDR5 memory, its storage potential makes it a great choice for businesses with big virtualization and capacity plans that want to avoid the expense of a 2P server.

Its predecessor, the DL345 Gen10 Plus, had plenty to say in the storage department, but the DL345 Gen11 adds new mid-tray and rear cage options that boost the number of bays to a maximum of 20 LFF or 34 SFF drives. There's more as HPE also offers new front cage options that support up to 36 EDSFF E3.S NVMe SSD storage devices.

With so much storage to play with, HPE is naturally aiming the DL345 Gen11 at data protection services. Prices for base models start at a shade under £4,400 with HPE's Veeam Backup and Recovery Solution upping this to around £10K and delivering 20TB of usable capacity plus a 1-year, 10 workload subscription to Veeam's Data Platform Foundation.

HPE ProLiant DL345 Gen11 review: Storage options

HPE pulled out all the stops for our review system as it supplied it with 32 SATA SFF SSDs. The standard 8+8+8 drive bay box configuration presented 24 drives at the front and we had the midtray fitted which added another eight drives.

The space above the dual PSU bay can be used for HPE's optional stacked dual SFF cage and the tri-mode backplanes for all configurations support SAS, SATA, and NVMe devices. For LFF drives, you have room for up to twelve at the front, and four in the mid-plane and if you're prepared to sacrifice some PCIe expansion slots, you can add another four at the rear.

The motherboard has four integrated SATA ports but the embedded SR100i RAID controller found in the DL345 Gen10 Plus is no longer present, so you'll need to specify one of HPE's SR (SmartRAID) or MR (MegaRAID) storage controllers. There are plenty to choose from and our system came with HPE's top-dog SR932i-p Gen11 tri-mode PCIe card which supports 6G SATA, 24G SAS, and 16G NVMe drives plus virtually all known RAID array types and has 8GB of battery-protected cache memory.

The server supports HPE's NS204i-u Gen11 boot optimized storage device which is worth considering if you want all your standard bays free for data storage. Slipping neatly into a small dedicated bay above the PSUs, it presents two hot-plug M.2 NVMe SSDs at the rear and provides mirrored redundant storage for running an OS or hypervisor.

HPE ProLiant DL345 Gen11 review: Build quality and expansion

Removing the lid reveals the mid-tray storage shelf sitting on top of the centrally-mounted CPU heatsink. The mid-tray bays are fully hot-swappable as you lift up the levers on each side and the whole cage flips up and presents all eight for easy access.

It's simple to get at the memory slots below as you pull the sprung retaining pin out from the right side of the mid-tray which releases it for removal. HPE has redesigned the server's memory configuration as the number of DIMM slots has been reduced from sixteen to twelve. These support up to 1,152GB using 96GB DDR5 Smart Memory modules or 3TB with 256GB octal-rank 3DS modules although the latter are very expensive and you can't specify the midtray if you use them.

Cooling is handled by a bank of six hot-plug fans with CPUs up to 200W requiring the standard models. Our AMD EPYC 9124 has a 200W TDP but as our server also has the storage mid-tray, it came with the high-performance heatsink kit and fans.

Expansion potential is excellent as you have dual three-slot risers at the back that support full-height, half-length PCIe 5 cards. There's room for more as underneath the risers are two OCP 3 PCIe 5 slots which support HPE's 'o' RAID cards and a good range of network adapters with our system kitted out with HPE's quad-port Gigabit module.

Another valuable feature is improved support for graphics acceleration as you can specify up to four single-width or two double-width GPUs. HPE's front enablement kit provides four or two full-height, full-length PCIe 5 slots and leaves enough room in between for a central drive cage for twelve EDSFF E3.S SSDs or eight SFF drives.

HPE ProLiant DL345 Gen11 review: Remote management services

HPE offers an impressive range of tools, utilities, and cloud platforms for remote server monitoring and management. It all starts with the server's embedded iLO6 controller which delivers a web interface packed with status information on all critical components and provides essential security features such as Secure Start, 'silicon root of trust' firmware fingerprinting, and SPDM (Security Protocol and Data Module) hardware component and PCIe expansion card authentication.

The iLO6 links up with HPE's OneView app which we run in the lab as a Hyper-V VM for monitoring and managing HPE servers, hypervisors, storage arrays, pools, and switches. Next is HPE's iLO Amplifier Pack which offers inventory and compliance reporting services for up to 10,000 Gen8, 9, 10, and 11 servers and sends diagnostics and telemetry information to HPE's InfoSight cloud service. 

HPE's star player is its GreenLake Compute Ops Management cloud service. This provides a single portal for viewing your entire infrastructure, centrally managing server deployments, and automating system lifecycle management and firmware compliance policies.

HPE ProLiant DL345 Gen11 review: Is it worth it?

HPE's ProLiant DL345 Gen11 is an incredibly versatile 1P rack server at a very tempting price. The combination of core-heavy AMD EPYC CPU and DDR5 memory make it a cost-effective virtualization platform while its outstanding expansion potential will appeal to businesses looking for a rack-dense high-capacity storage solution.

HPE ProLiant DL345 Gen11 specifications