Gateway GR380 F1 review

When Acer launched is Gateway business technology brand earlier this year, the company made it very clear to us that the UK server market is critical to its success. Gateway has a big family of rack, pedestal and blade servers and the model naming convention it’s used leaves us in no doubt that HP is its main target.

Gateway is targeting the channel only and plans to compete primarily in the 1,000 seat space. On review is the new GR380 F1 which probably has the toughest job of all Gateway servers as it targets HP’s ProLiant DL380 G7 . The ProLiant sets the standard for 2U rack servers and in this review we find out whether Gateway can match or even beat it.

The GR380 gets off to a good start by equalling HP for storage capacity - it has room in its front panel for up to sixteen SFF hard disks in hot-swap carriers. The system on review is a base model with one eight-disk bay but, unlike HP, adding a second bay doesn’t mean you have to give up the optical drive as Gateway has adopted vertical carrier mounts which take up less space.

For disk connections you start with the embedded Intel SATA controller which has six ports. With a DVD drive taking one port this only leaves you five for the hard disks so if you want to use all eight bays you’ll need to add an extra RAID expansion card.

HP’s DL380 G7 has superior RAID features out of the box since it has an embedded P410i Smart Array controller which supports up to eight SAS/SATA drives and RAID 6. Further storage expansion procedures are the same for Gateway and HP as you need to add a second eight-drive expansion bay plus an extra RAID card to manage it.