Boston Quattro 1332-T reviewed by IT Pro

In the world of cloud computing, rack density is king. Yet it's surprising how slow some of the blue chip server vendors have been to catch on. Indeed, only Dell has shown any initiative in this area, as we saw in our exclusive review of its PowerEdge C6100 cloud server. HP, IBM and Fujitsu have so far failed to deliver anything to match it...

...Supermicro, on the other hand, has been an innovator in this field and has been designing and building multi-node servers for many years. In this review we take a closer look at Boston's latest Quattro 1332-T which shows off Supermicro's MicroCloud initiative and also takes advantage of the Xeon E3 processor which Intel has aimed firmly at microserver applications...

...This isn't Boston's first microserver as its Green Power 2200-T delivered eight server nodes in a 2U chassis...

...Standing at 1U higher, the Quattro 1332-T also delivers eight server nodes but each one is totally independent. Support for the full range of Xeon E3 processors makes it better suited to heavier loads than the 2200-T and each node can handle a lot more memory...

...Boston's storage options are superior to Dell as the embedded SATA controller in the C6100 doesn't support any RAID arrays...

...Virtualisation is on Boston's agenda as the nodes have an internal USB port and a USB pin header for booting into an embedded hypervisor. There's also an embedded SATA II port with a power header next to it so you can boot the node from a SATA DOM...

...Power is now a major issue in rack dense server rooms and the 1332-T proved to be undemanding. As a baseline we measured the chassis with all nodes turned off consuming only 15W...

...Boston's latest Quattro 1332-T delivers a rack density that looks quite capable of giving blade servers a good run for the money. Data centres will approve of its low power consumption and with each node costing less than £1,000 each, it's good value as well...

...Boston's Quattro 1332-T puts up some stiff competition to Dell's C-Series cloud systems and looks a lot better value than blade servers for businesses that want a good balance between cost and processing density...

...The server has an innovative design, its remote management features match those of Dell's C6100 and it's highly energy efficient as well making it a fine choice as a cloud computing platform.