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The ProLiant DL560 Gen8 may also be a 2U rack server but it\'s clearly a different beast to the R820. Storage options are more limited as the DL560 only has room for five SFF hard disks at the front.\n\nHP\'s thinking here is that most of its customers will be offloading storage to a separate location and really just need the server to have local boot capabilities. If this isn\'t the case and you want
Removing the lid shows HP has opted for a much simpler internal layout with the four CPU sockets mounted on a single motherboard. To squeeze all the extra storage into the R820, Dell has used a 2P system board and a 2P mezzanine card which sits on top and can be removed with a large lever.
HP argues that its design is less likely to cause problems than Dell's mezzanine card pin connectors, which could be a weak spot. Suffice to say the lab's R820 has had its mezzanine card out quite a few times (mainly to show it off) and it's still working fine.
The price for the review system includes a quartet of 2.4GHz E5-4640 modules. These are near the top of this family of eight CPUs and are endowed with eight cores plus a 20MB L3 cache and support an 8GT/sec QPI plus Intel's HyperThreading and Turbo Boost.
The E5-4600 family is designed for scalable dual and glue-less quad-socket platforms so you can cut costs and start off with a 2P system. The E5-4600 Xeons have two QPI links per socket and when you add the extra CPUs they connect with adjacent sockets in a ring architecture.
A key feature is memory capacity as a 4P system supports 48 DIMM sockets and scales up to 1.5TB using 32GB quad-ranked LR-DIMMs. You may think the high memory capacity puts them in direct competition with the Xeon E7. However, Intel has positioned the E5-4600 as a better choice where an equal balance of cost, performance, power consumption and memory capacity is required.
The E5-4600 certainly wins out over the Xeon E7 for its low power consumption. With the server's OS in idle, we measured it drawing only 140W and with SiSoft Sandra punishing all 64 logical cores, this peaked at 467W.
Fujitsu's Primergy RX600 S6 and its quartet of 2GHz E7-4850 Xeons pulled a hefty 427W in idle. With SiSoft Sandra running against its 80 logical cores, this peaked at a much higher 760W.
Expansion potential
Network options are very different to previous generations of ProLiants as HP has removed all embedded network ports and replaced them with a FlexibleLOM card slot. The review system includes the dual-port 10GbE SFP card but HP also offers quad-Gigabit or 10/40Gbps Infiniband modules.
Expansion options are good as the 4P system supports a pair of PCI-Express risers each with three slots. HP's internal layout gives it an edge over Dell's R820 as it has a lot more room at the back for the expansion cards.
The R820's CPU mezzanine card limits it to supporting half-length cards only. The DL560 Gen8 has enough room for full length cards in each riser's top slot and all six slots support full-width cards.
These 4P systems are ideal candidates for virtualisation and the DL560 Gen8 has onboard USB and microSD card slots for booting into an embedded hypervisor. However, Dell is the winner if you want hypervisor redundancy as its R820 supports dual internal SD card slots.
The DL560 Gen8 gets the benefit of most of the features introduced in the eighth generation ProLiants. It's endowed with HP's excellent iLO4 remote management controller which we covered in depth in our exclusive review of HP's ProLiant DL360p Gen8.
OS deployment is streamlined with Intelligent Provisioning which is accessed from the startup menu and does away with the need for HP's SmartStart DVD. And then there are HP's new SmartDrive disk carriers with their myriad status LEDs plus the latest embedded Smart Array P420i RAID controller and its 2GB of capacitor protected FBWC memory.
HP's latest 4P server scores highly for value as there's little price difference between its ProLiant DL560 Gen8 and Dell's PowerEdge R820. If you need a high local storage capacity and hypervisor redundancy then we recommend the R820.
The DL560 Gen8 is equally well built but has better expansion potential as its tidier internal design leaves more room for a wider choice of PCI-e cards. And HP won't be beaten for remote management as the embedded iLO4 delivers the best range of features in its class.
It’s been a long wait but HP’s first E5-4600 Xeon server delivers a well designed platform for running business critical apps and heavy duty virtualisations. Internal storage capacity is low but its design leaves plenty of room for expansion, it represents good value and it’s a lot easier on the power supply than a Xeon E7 system.
