Review: Lenovo RD210 Server Holds Its Ground In 1U Arena

Among the chief benefits of including IMM in the ThinkServer RD210 is that the management capabilities are reduced to a single chip, compared with the multiple hardware components used by the BMC and Remote Supervisor Adapter. This also means management can be handled through a single IP address.

The Dell PowerEdge R610 and the HP DL360 G6 servers are direct competitors, and they vary in important but not widely different ways. The Dell R610 has 12 DIMM slots (two fewer than the ThinkServer RD210) with a listed maximum of 96GB of RAM. The HP DL360 G6 has 18 DIMM slots (two more than the RD210), for a maximum of 144GB of RAM. Inside the 1U envelope, the competing products jockey within fairly close tolerances of each other. Even the stated maximum configurations are using prohibitively expensive 8GB RAM paired with two fair, but not top-of-the-line Intel processors. More realistic system configurations yield more closely matched prices and capacity.

The ThinkServer RD210 hosted a Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 environment with the Hyper-V role enabled in eWEEK Labs tests. The system was configured with five Windows 2008 servers and one Windows 2003 server hosting Microsoft Unified Access Gateway implementation. The ThinkServer RD210 was easily able to handle this relatively light workload with the 12GB of RAM supplied in my test unit.

The RD210 boasts some management features that I haven’t seen in competitive systems. A pop-out diagnostic unit on the front bezel made it easy to see at a glance how power, memory, hard drive and other hardware subsystems were performing. This same information can be accessed via the IMM.

The server also comes with HFP (Hardware Failure Prediction), which uses information about hardware subsystems – including memory and hard drive performance data – that is then combined with logic contained in the RD210 to detect when a component is exhibiting symptoms that indicate imminent failure. This information is relayed through the on-board management system to system managers, alerting them before the fault occurs so that pre-emptive action can be taken.

The combination of compute capacity plus effective and forward-looking management tools places the ThinkServer RD210 squarely in the pack of 1U servers that are worth considering when adding general-purpose workhorse power to a data centre.