Price: £1,103.41 (£959.49 ex Vat)
Manufacturer: Lenovo 0844 800 0550
Specifications: Tower chassis • 2.66GHz Xeon X3330 processor • Intel 3210 chipset • 2GB 800MHz DDR2 memory • Four hot-swap 3.5in hard disk bays • 250GB 7,200rpm hard disk • LSI Raid controller • Integrated Gigabit Ethernet interface • Bundled network management software
Verdict
Pros: IBM engineering quality; choice of Xeon dual-core processors; four hot-swap drive bays; Raid controller
Cons: Easymanage software may be overkill for many small businesses; little to differentiate this product from IBM original
Overall: A well-engineered small-business server but little to set it apart from the IBM X Series product on which it’s based
The Thinkserver is Lenovo’s first foray into the small-business server market, albeit with more than a small helping hand from IBM.
However, unlike when the Chinese vendor bought its desktop and notebook business, IBM is being more selective with its servers.
So far at least, it has only agreed to Lenovo selling single and dual-socket servers, based on its industry standard X Series technology.
A limited number of Thinkserver models have been released so far, with the TS100 very much a starter system aimed at companies looking for a general-purpose server capable of both file sharing and limited email, database and web hosting.
The hardware certainly looks the part, with the TS100 housed in a solid metal tower case with room for a second redundant power supply if needed. As with the IBM original, the engineering is high quality. The only issue we had was the somewhat unusual sloped fascia which does little more than provide a trip hazard.
Inside there’s masses of space and several fans, which is good but does make the TS100 a fairly noisy device in day-to-day operation. Access is via a lockable side panel but the lack of similar protection for the storage bays could be a concern.
There’s room for just one Xeon processor on the Intel-based IBM motherboard. Ours was shipped with a 2.66GHz dual-core Xeon X3330. However, if you’re on a budget we found TS100 servers equipped with the Xeon E3110 selling for less than £600 ex Vat. Despite having a slightly faster clock speed at 3GHz, this processor has less cache and a slower front-side bus but is more than adequate for a lot of small-business requirements.
Unless otherwise specified Lenovo fits 2GB of Ram on the TS100, with four slots altogether to extend this to 8GB if needed. An integrated Broadcom Gigabit network interface is also built in, together with six USB ports, two of which are needed for the keyboard and mouse.
On the storage front the base specification only includes one hard disk, in our case a 7,200rpm 250GB Sata (serial ATA) drive, with 160GB on the cheaper E3110-based model. Most buyers will want to add to this so there’s room for up to four disks altogether in a set of hot-swap drive bays located at the front of the unit. The review machine also came with an LSI-based Raid controller in a custom mini-PCI slot, offering support for a variety of array levels including 0, 1 and 5.
A DVD-Rom reader is fitted as standard on all models but a server operating system isn’t included, although you get an Easystartup disk to help load the software you want to use. Lenovo has also partnered with Landesk to develop the Easymanage software that, similarly, ships with all Thinkserver models.
Unfortunately this network management platform can be quite complicated to set up and use, and is more than most small businesses will need, especially where a single server and a handful of desktops are involved.
In its favour we had no problems getting the Thinkserver TS100 to work and were impressed with what it has to offer. However, you can get much the same product from IBM vendors now with quad-core processors. There is very little to differentiate the Lenovo product apart from the bundled software and support services, which resellers often duplicate anyway.
Source : pcw.co.uk
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