We had the opportunity to test the new seventh series of Fujitsu Primergy RX300 server, which is deployed in our company mainly for virtualization.
Fujistu has always promoted their Primergy RX300 as a server designed for virtualization. In this article, we will discuss its latest model of the seventh generation. Along with support for Intel’s new Xeon processors (the E5-2600 family), it offers huge memory capacity and interesting combinations of disk space.
The chassis design hasn’t changed much since the 6 series, we found only 3 minor changes. Specifically, a nicer lever for hinging the lid and clips instead of screws to attach the front of the server to the rack. A new part of the chassis is the slide-out display. From our point of view, however, it is more of an ornament than a real useful thing. Just for fun, the acronym is LSD (local service display)
The front of the chassis can accommodate up to 16 2.5″ HDD bays or 6 3.5″ HDD bays, depending on the design. In our rental version we had 3 drives (SAS 6G 600GB 10K HOT PL 2.5″ EP).
On the front panel we also find a power button, two USB ports, a diode for server localization and 8 diodes indicating errors on various parts of the server. At the back we have two inputs for ~230V backup power (2x 450W power supply), four USB, VGA, COM and 3 Ethernet ports, one of which is for management only.
The server comes standard with built-in iRMC S3, which is a remote management system. It includes a web interface with a detailed listing of component status, power consumption, control mechanisms and most importantly KVM for remote management over IP.
Fujitsu has improved the internal design of the server to make it a bit “tidier”. The entire board is hidden under a plastic cover that optimally distributes the airflow to the cooled components. With S6, quite a lot of space was taken up by the source, S7 has much less. This was necessary because otherwise the server would not fit 24 DIMM slots. These can hold up to 768GB of RAM. The board now looks like an “embarked military unit”. In the channel in the middle are two sockets for the processor and around them are four banks of six slots for RAM.
Cooling is provided by five hot-swap fans mounted in brackets between the motherboard and the drives. In the original S6 version, the fans were connected to the board by “feet on a stick”, now Fujitsu has returned to the original concept and each fan slides onto the connectors when inserted.
The motherboard offers several options for connecting drives starting with a four-port integrated SATA controller enabling RAID 1 and RAID 0, all the way up to a PCI Express card from LSI allowing up to twelve 6G SAS drives to be connected in different RAID levels.
We had the Primergy RX300 in this configuration for testing:
- 4x 8GB 2Rx4 L DDR 3 – 1600 R ECC
- 3x HD SAS 6G 600GB 10K HOT PL 2.5″ EP
- 1x Intel Xeon E5-2650 8C/16T 2.00GHz 20MB
The results of the consumption measurements were quite satisfactory. At first we were concerned that the power consumption (according to the documentation for the processors) would be higher than for the older models of processors. However, the measurements led us out of the mistake and we measured the consumption as follows.
| Status | Consumption [W] |
| without load | 168 |
| fully loaded CPU | 207 |