Conclusion

All six systems reviewed here offer some very interesting specifications for the price, but there could only ever be one winner of our Editor’s Choice award.

The Primergy RX300S3 from Fujitsu Siemens was way out in front for its superb specification – it was the only server on test to deliver a pair of the latest quad-core Xeon CPUs. It provides everything we would expect to see in a 2U rack server: plenty of Raid-protected SAS storage on tap, a generous helping of fully buffered memory and good remote management features. Expansion capabilities are also impressive, making the Primergy a good, long-term investment for any organisation’s datacentre.

It was a close race for second between HP’s elegant ProLiant DL380 G5 and Dell’s mighty PowerEdge 2950, but HP’s pair of fast dual-core Xeons, 4GB of memory and well-designed SAS storage earn it an Enterprise IT Week Recommended award. HP’s software bundle and embedded iLO2 controller chip also offer the best remote server management tools around.