Gateway GR360 F1 review

With the UK server market pretty much sewn up by the big five vendors you’d have thought there wasn’t room for any more, but the Acer Group thinks otherwise. Gateway, now owned by Acer, is back in town and is launching a big family of rack, pedestal and blade servers with a firm focus on small to medium businesses.

In this review we look at the new GR360 F1 rack server and from the model names chosen, it’s crystal clear which company Gateway has at the top of its hit list. It’s been quite brazen with its naming convention as GR360 F1 takes on HP’s ProLiant DL360. Other servers in this family leave you under no illusions as the Gateway GR380 2U rack server takes on HP’s top selling ProLiant DL380 and the pedestal-based GR350 is pitted against the ML350.

Gateway isn’t implementing a direct sales model, but is targeting the channel only. It plans to compete in the 1,000 seat space where, the company told us, it sees plenty of room for a creditable second place so IBM and Dell are also in its sights. The GR360 F1 is certainly far superior to the old Acer Altos products.

The GR360 F1 matches HP’s DL360 in the storage department as the server’s front panel has room for up to eight hot-swap Small Form Factor (SFF) SAS or SATA hard disks. RAID options start with an embedded Intel controller which supports the six embedded SATA ports on the motherboard. It can handle mirrors, stripes and RAID-5, but these are implemented in software only.