back to article HP adds 'Haswell' Xeon E3s to entry ProLiant servers

CEO Meg Whitman said last month that HP knew it has some competitive weakness at the low-end of its x86 server line that rivals were exploiting, and at its Discover customer and partner shindig in Las Vegas this week, the company is rolling out three new entry servers that will help the company compete better against a very …

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  1. David Hicks
    Linux

    I'd be interested to see the numbers

    "Virtually all customers will want Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012."

    I personally know of three of the N40L variants in the wild. None run windows. But then these are the toys of tech enthusiasts so may not represent SME usage.

    1. Dazed and Confused

      Re: I'd be interested to see the numbers

      > Virtually all customers will want Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2012.

      Well I run two at home, they run CentOS.

      All the others I know of are running CentOS, Debian or OpenNAS. For a couple of years you could get a cash back on these MicroServers which gave them an affective cost of £120+VAT, at which point they were very attractive for home usage as they're far quieter than, say, my QNAP and really cheap as fileservers in small businesses, The Windows license costs are massively to high so why bother when all the small business needs is a fileserver.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I'd be interested to see the numbers

        "For a couple of years you could get a cash back on these MicroServers which gave them an affective cost"

        Ebuyer are currently shifting the last of their stock of the N54L, and it can be had for £100 delivered. Great little box once you stuff it full of hard drives and I cannot recommend it enough as a home NAS/server.

        1. David Hicks
          Happy

          Re: I'd be interested to see the numbers

          "Great little box once you stuff it full of hard drives and I cannot recommend it enough as a home NAS/server."

          Yup. Got a 5-disk zfs pool going in mine, and yes they're around £100 quid on ebuyer again at the mo. I've paid more than that for far less powerful ARM NAS boxes in the past and the N40L blows them away.

          I'm just hoping they do the low-price/cashback offers on the new variant too, as it sounds like it could have a bit more grunt to it and I always need more toys :)

        2. Dazed and Confused

          Re: I'd be interested to see the numbers

          Ebuyer are currently shifting the last of their stock of the N54L, and it can be had for £100

          Ta!

          2 more on order,

          in office upgrades for the ML110's

          upgrades because they're quieter.

          CentOS again.

    2. An0n C0w4rd

      Re: I'd be interested to see the numbers

      Lots of threads about the N40L talk about Windows Home Server on the boxes.

      I don't personally see much point in buying a chassis that was 150 quid after a rebate and then paying several times that for a full Windows Server license. Stick some open source OS on there with samba (and netatalk if you have Macs) and you're laughing.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I'd be interested to see the numbers

      I've got two of them, one runs Vmware, the other Hyper-v 2012. On them run various Windows, Linux, UNIX and more obscure OS VMs. They're cracking little boxes, quiet, low power and look pretty good to boot.

      I know of a few others that some of the other guys I work with have and they all run Windows/Linux/UNIX.

  2. Sandtitz Silver badge
    Meh

    That DL320e Gen8 v2...

    ...looks most interesting of the crop, and could actually fit in many shallow telco rack cabinets.

    The only negative side is the single PSU. They could have sacrificed one PCIe slot or made the whole thing 2U, whichever.

    the rest in the article are just the usual same-old, just refreshed for this year. Nothing to see here.

    Also, quoting the switching bandwidth is rather pointless these days. Are there really any switch vendors/products who don't claim the max backplane bandwidth to be that of all ports combined full duplex?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Microserver

    The new Microserver while a step-up from the previous generation is sort of a let down. Sticking an E3 in it would have made it a great server. The CPU's they are using are 35W parts and there are two 45W parts available. Sure the price would be higher, but make the Microserver a true server though. Those 45W parts also have 4 cores and 8 threads. The cheapest E3 part is 25W and also has 4 cores and 8 threads. The E3-1230LV3 would have been perfect for it.

    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: Microserver

      Sticking a Fusion would have been the right step up.

      I was buying the previous ones as a default choice for anything from lab machine, through devel machine, house server and even small desktop.

      The 1.3 (earliest) to 2.2 (latest) dual core low power Athlons provided more than enough power while running totally fanless (It was operating at 800 when idle not all the time - article is wrong on that). Decent onboard storage controller and disk cage, decent onboard networking, enough space for 2 more PCI network cards or PCI network and a low power video. The only let-down of the old model was the rather ancient video. A basic E450 or similar low power Fusion part would have solved that. A via Nano 64 bit model would have been interesting too. While its performance leaves a lot to be desired, it still kills everyone else on encryption - line rate crypto for all data on the machine. Rather useful feature for a server you can drop in a bag and walk out with. There would have been a niche for that too (nicely matching current HP thin client lineup which is Nano based).

      Moving to a Celeron and corresponding Intel onboard chippery is a total step down compared to the older design on all counts. The video which was a major let down got worse (do we like it or not but the crowd likely to use a microserver is also likely to use a GUI). The performance in 64 bit mode too. Running it with inline crypto for the filesystems on a celery ? You gotta be kidding.

      It is not a proper upgrade - it is a pretty badly executed downgrade with marketing fluff on it.

      1. Dazed and Confused

        Re: Microserver

        > the crowd likely to use a microserver is also likely to use a GUI

        you need the video card at times because the management card isn't on the mainboard and the two PCI slots are full of network cards and besides the management card is a significant fraction of the price of the box. So the video card is needed for boot and to kick off the install. After which any GUI stuff can be networked.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Microserver

      An E3-1230LV3 would also cost HP five or ten times what the celeron/pentium does (I have a V2 in my main fileserver box, a microserver for backups) . The microserver is cheap because it uses cheap commodity kit - plumping it up with proper server CPUs would defeat the whole point of it.

  4. PowerBenny
    Mushroom

    WHS? WTF?

    My microsever runs Open Media Vault and of the 10 or so guys I work with who have them at home I'd say maybe 2 have Windows on it. To their eternal shame.

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