HP ProLiant ML110 G7 review

HP’s latest ProLiant ML110 G7 is designed for small businesses on a tight budget looking to purchase their first purpose-built server. This is HP’s first Xeon E3 tower server and it also has a few tricks up its sleeve that make it a good choice for larger companies that want to deploy local IT services to remote sites and branches.

HP scores highly in our books for remote server management as the ML110 has an embedded iLO3 controller. This is the same controller as found in all the high-end ProLiant servers which we first saw in our review of the ProLiant DL380 G7.

The server comes as standard with HP's excellent iLO3 remote management controller.

The iLO3 shares access with the first of the server’s two Gigabit Ethernet ports, but you can buy an optional upgrade which adds a dedicated management port. These features make the ML110 G7 well suited to remote sites, branch offices or IT providers as it can be accessed easily over the Internet for full remote diagnostics and, with the optional upgrade, remote control.

We were quite fond of Dell’s little PowerEdge T110 II, but that model is beaten soundly by HP when it comes to remote management. It doesn’t support Dell’s iDRAC6 Express or Enterprise optional upgrades and only had a basic embedded BMC (baseboard management controller). This provides very limited remote access to the server and only allows the power supply to be controlled using Dell’s IPMISH command line utility.

Power options are also superior as the ML110 G7 can be supplied with a fixed 350W supply or up to two 460W hot-plug supplies. The review system included one 460W hot-plug supply with the second module costing around £155.

The server is also easy on power consumption with our in-line power meter clocking the review system at only 35W with Windows Server 2008 R2 in idle. With the SiSoft Sandra benchmarking application exercising the eight logical cores of the Xeon E3 processor this peaked at only 97W.