Evesham Technology SilverEDGE 1050AL

Evesham brushes all-comers aside in the processor department as the SilverEDGE 1050AL is the only system on review that came equipped with Intel's brand spanking new quad core server chip. Codenamed Clovertown, the latest 5300 series of processors is designed for dual-socket systems and incorporates a pair of 5100 series Woodcrest cores.

To keep under our price ceiling, Evesham was only able to stretch to a single 1.86GHz 5320 processor but you get a hefty 8MB of on-die L2 cache per processor module which is achieved by each physical 5100 core delivering 4MB of L2 cache. With a spare processor socket up for grabs, the 1050AL has plenty of room to grow with demand and it also offers a very tempting storage proposition. The front panel is home to no less than eight 2.5in hot-swap drive bays which accept SAS or SATA hard disks and the system came with a quartet of 73GB SAS drives.

Internal design looks nice and tidy with all cabling kept to a minimum and tucked up out of the air flow. The motherboard actually has an embedded SATA controller but the drive bays are serviced by a separate midplane board. This provides the SAS services and uses a bridge board to connect to a proprietary socket on the motherboard. It also comes with an embedded RAID controller, a mini-DIMM socket for cache memory and support for RAID-5 and -50 and well as stripes and mirrors.

Cooling is dealt with by a bank of five dual rotor fans and noise levels are reasonably low although adding a second processor may cause an increase in volume. The price includes 2GB of fully buffered memory whilst expansion card options are handled by a vertical riser card with PCI-e 4X slots on each side. Fault tolerance extends to power and the system came with both hot-swap supplies.

Intel has been working on its server management tools and now bundles its Active System Console and LANDesk System Manager utility. The former provides a smartly designed web interface with easy access to areas such as temperatures, voltages, fan speeds, hard disk space and CPU status. Remote management gets a boost as the 1050AL also includes the optional RMM add-on module which provides a dedicated network port allowing the server to be remotely controlled via a secure web browser session irrespective of its condition. The 1050AL is offering a very tempting proposition as it delivers the best mix of hardware and support for up to eight hard disks provides the best storage expansion options on all the systems on review.