Just when I was ready to send it back to HP, a server in a PBX review tanked -- once again into the breach went the DL380, and once again it performed perfectly.
HP has designed a capable, high-performance, highly flexible server for the enterprise rack and has priced it so that it's a reasonable buy for departments and the SMB market. The DL380 seems to embody an IT manager's wish list: No matter what I asked of this machine, it delivered.
Powering up
HP does not include an operating system with the DL380; the company says that the DL380 will support Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003, as well as two flavors of Linux -- Red Hat and Suse. It is an industry-standard Intel-based machine, so nearly any OS for Intel systems should work if you can find the drivers.
Inside the gray box are provisions for one or two Intel Xeon processors running at speeds as fast as 3.8GHz. Memory runs at 400MHz, and it supports both ECC (error-correcting code) and online spare memory. There's a megabyte of cache for each processor (2MB is available for some), and the FSB (front-side bus) runs at 800MHz.