Simply best in class

The Compaq DL380 rocks. In a large datacenter, I can't see a reason to use any other brand - Compaq thinks things through.

First things first - physical characteristics. Getting this thing out of the box and mounted in the rack no problem. You get a superior cable-management arm, easy-to-use rack sliders, etc. The Compaq racks beautifully, tightly, and neatly. Every rack gizmo you'll ever need is available from Compaq. The machine itself is a little on the heavy side, but it screams durability.

In 3U of rack space, you get a server capable of six onboard, hot-swap drives (or 4 drives and a DLT tape unit!!), 2 CPU's, and 4 gigs of RAM, not to mention 5 PCI slots and dual, hot-swap power supplies.. And the RAID card and network cards are built-in! That's a sexy little unit.

We built a terminal server farm with 20 of these, a monitor, keyboard and mouse, and attendant KVM switches into two racks. Not the densest installation in the world, but it's pretty tight. No heat problems, and no unsightly and hard to troubleshoot spaghetti mass of cables in back.

Now on to OS installation. It's a breeze. The Smartstart process leads you through the whole thing in a couple of hours - including RAID configuration, hardware detection, OS load, and management tool installation. It's simple, and you only need three CD's - SmartStart, Compaq Management, and the OS CD. No "F6" to load special storage drivers. No stack of floppies for various system firmware updates. And you can streamline this to one CD if you put the Compaq Integration Server software somewhere on your network. The process is simple enough that you could delegate it to some of your newest HelpDesk members.

Once the system is up, hardware management is a no-brainer. Run the Insight Manager (CIM) console from your desktop, and be able to remotely update system firmware, BIOS, etc. Further, CIM can be configured to monitor many things, such as system availability, CPU load, disk usage, and more. Build a pretty status console and impress your boss. Do a hardware inventory of all your Compaq machines from your desktop, automatically, in an hour or so. Yahoo!

When you have to work on the hardware, or upgrade it, no problem. If you used the rackmount hardware, you can do it all at the rack, without disconnecting any cables. The case opens easily and is well laid out. No sharp edges. No oddities requiring the dexterity of a concert pianist to mount hardware or screw it down. All documentation is online, well formatted and indexed. I have never needed to call Compaq to find anything out - it's all there. There are even 8 extra screws inside the case, though I have never needed one because this thing is pretty well tool-free.

This is a smart, compact unit, with a lot of power. Put a pair of P3/933's in it, load it with up to 4 gigs of RAM, and it'll handle just about all of your datacenter needs. There aren't many reasons to buy a bigger server (and if you need one, try the DL580!). Simply enough, this is the PC server to judge all others by in today's market.