Fujitsu Primergy RX200 S4

By Greg Crowe

Connecting state and local government leaders

| September 26, 2008

Fujitsu Primergy's RX200 S4 will serve Web pages well enough, but its price could be more than an administrator might want to pay for a mid-size Web server.

FUJITSU'S PRIMERGY RX200 S4 will serve Web pages well enough, but its price could be more than an administrator might want to pay for a midsize Web server. It comes in a 1U rackmountable unit with lot of features packed into what is usually a challenging space for computer manufacturers.[IMGCAP(1)]A thin 1U form factor typically allows easy access to most components, and the Primergy is no exception. It takes the matter one step further by having a small panel that lets you change the six highpowered mini-fans without having to remove the large top panel. Because a Web server is likely to be constantly powered, the fans are probably the component that will need changing the most.The Primergy's 8G of memory is in four 2G modules, which take up only four of its 12 memory slots. This means that you can increase the memory to 40G without having to replace the original modules.One of the weak points of the 1U form factor is the minimal room for expansion. The Fujitsu only has two drive bays, each with a 73G SAS drive in a RAID 1 (mirrored) configuration, yielding only 73G of space total but with maximum backup protection. This is adequate space for most basic Web sites, but you would need more room for anything more complicated. The RX200 does have the option for four 2.5-inch bays instead of the two 3.5- inch ones, which could help the drive space situation a bit.The Primergy does provide space for as many as two PCIe x8 peripheral slots, one of which can be full height. It is nice to have this bit of flexibility in a typically less flexible form factor. Fujitsu also managed to find room for two hot-swappable redundant power supplies and a second Gigabit Ethernet port in addition to the typical USB, video and serial ports.In our benchmark tests, the Primergy managed a score of 2,273, the highest in the review by a narrow margin. This is because of its two Intel Xeon Quad Core E5440 processors and the 8G of memory.However, the slower hard drive performance reared its head when the file transfer tests yielded 29.39 megabits/sec when going to the server and 44.13 megabits/sec going the other way, making it one of the slower ones in the review.Although the Primergy took the longest time to load the Web page via the network, at an average of 12 seconds, it was actually the second quickest when loading from an external computer, at 1 minute, 26 seconds. This array of mixed results yielded a decent but not outstanding performance grade.We found the Primergy's retail price of $4,967 to be in the upper end of a decent price, considering the redundancies and large amount of memory.Please note that we based the Value grade for the Primergy RX200 S4 upon a higher price that was incorrectly given to us

Fujitsu Primergy's RX200 S4 will serve Web pages well enough, but its price could be more than an administrator might want to pay for a mid-size Web server.

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