IT Pro Verdict
A great choice for power hungry businesses, the low-profile ProLiant DL360 Gen10 is well designed, surprisingly expandable and eminently manageable
Pros
- +
Superb internal design; Xeon Scalable CPUs; Innovative storage options; HPE iLO5 management and firmware security; Very good value; Dual 10/25GbE ports included
Cons
- -
Nothing of note
Targeting businesses looking for a high density rack server that can handle demanding workloads, HPE's ProLiant DL360 Gen10 packs a remarkable range of features into its slim-line 1U chassis. Along with support for Intel's core-heavy Xeon Scalable CPUs, it sees a major internal redesign, allowing it to offer an extensive choice of storage options including up to 10 NVMe drives.
In this exclusive review we look at HPE's Performance model 867963-B21, which brings together a pair of Xeon Gold CPUs and teams them up with a decent 32GB of DDR4 SmartMemory. No drives are included in the price, but the chassis has eight SFF hot-swap bays ready and waiting.
Usefully, the 8-bay SFF model we have can be field-upgraded to support 10 NVMe drives. Costing around 740, the kit includes a new backplane and requires all seven cooling fans, which are already fitted in our server so it's ready to go.
In fact, storage versatility is a key design feature of the DL360 Gen10. Even with the NVMe backplane fitted, it allows you to mix up NVMe drives with SAS/SATA SFF hard disks so you can tailor it to fit your workload demands.
Design
HPE has done a fine job with internal design, as it's all remarkably tidy inside. The two 12-core 2.3GHz Xeon Gold 5118 CPUs are fitted with solid passive heatsinks and flanked by 24 DIMM slots, allowing memory to be pushed to a massive 3TB.
There are a couple of provisos though, as the Xeon Gold 5118 CPUs only support memory speeds up to 2,400MHz. Furthermore, if you want to expand to 3TB of memory, you'll need to specify Gold 6100 or Platinum 8100 CPUs with an 'M' suffix as these support 1.5TB per socket.
As this server is a Performance model, it comes with all seven cooling fans lined up between the motherboard and drive backplane. These are the hot-plug variety so they can be replaced without powering the server down, although we found their small size makes them fiddly to remove and replace.
There's plenty of room to expand and the server has two risers at the back offering a total of three PCI-Express slots. You won't need to use them for network expansion though, as the server has quad embedded Gigabit ports and the price includes HPE's FlexibleLOM snap-in adapter with dual 10/25GbE fibre ports.
