Fujitsu Primergy RX900 S1 review

There are six gigabit Ethernet ports, as well as a pair of embedded 10-Gigabit Ethernet SFP (small form-factor pluggable) ports. Alongside the bank of Gigabit ports is a network service port which provides access to Fujitsu’s iRMC S2 controller for remote monitoring and management. It has a well designed web interface with status views of critical components and full access to all power controls. Power monitoring is provided so you can watch graphs of power consumption but budgeting, which adds options for the best performance, minimum power settings or power capping, will only be supported in a later firmware upgrade.

Whereas Dell, IBM and HP want to look after your entire network infrastructure, Fujitsu is only interested in servers so its bundled ServerView Suite software concentrates on managing your Primergy boxes only. It provides a top level ServerList interface which displays all systems with the agent installed and offers full hardware inventory, system status displays and fault notification.

The RX900 S1 offers plenty of power redundancy with up to four compact 2025W hot-plug supplies. With four top-end X7560 2.26GHz Xeons and 256GB of memory we expected consumption to be high, but our tests showed it wasn’t excessive. Using our in-line meter linked to a pair of the power supplies, we measured a draw of 750W with Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise in idle. Using SiSoft Sandra to push all the 64 logical cores in the review system to the max, we recorded a peak consumption of 1091W.

This is higher than the IBM x3850 X5 which recorded 485W and 835W for these two tests. However, it only had a quarter the memory and four lower power 2GHz X7550 Xeons. It’s also worth bearing in mind that scaling an x3850 X5 up to two linked systems will probably result in a much higher power draw that the single chassis RX900 S1.

None of the other blue chips currently have anything that can compete with the RX900 S1. HP’s much vaunted ProLiant DL980 G7 has yet to make an appearance, IBM doesn’t offer a single eight-socket chassis and it’s debatable whether Dell will even venture into this territory. This puts Fujitsu in a unique position and the RX900 S1 sets a very high standard for those that follow.