Boston Green Power 1200-6 review

Six hot swap fans handle chassis cooling and most of the motherboard is covered by a large, transparent shroud to help direct airflow. The 1200-6 isn’t as quiet as the R185, which is almost silent, but in a rack cabinet installation its low noise levels won’t be an issue.

Supermicro’s embedded Remote Management Module (RMM) provides dedicated remote management access to the server regardless of its condition. You can power it off and on, reset it or gracefully close down the operating system, view a wide range of sensors for critical components and fire up a remote control session. Whereas the likes of HP, IBM and Dell expect you to buy an upgrade to get remote control and virtual media services, Supermicro includes these free. The RMM does provide a good range of essential management features but with the focus now moving sharply to power management and monitoring, Supermicro would do well to consider adding these features to its solution.

When we reviewed the PowerEdge R815 we were impressed with its features and design and felt that Dell had set a very high standard for the rest follow. Boston’s Green Power 1200-6 doesn’t quite match up to the R815 for features and build quality, but it easily sets the mark as the lowest cost quad Opteron 6100 server currently on the market. With a price tag of just over £8,000, the Green Power 1200-6 is good value as it costs less than half that of an equivalent 4P Xeon 7500 system. It's a good choice for SMBs looking to move up to 4P servers, possibly with a view to consolidating older 1P and 2P systems.