The DL380 uses EM64T processors, so you can run 64-bit software on them -- assuming you can find it. You can mount six hot-swap Ultra 320 SCSI drives that are removable from the front of the chassis, and the USB port is accessible from the front of the server, which is a significant convenience for the IT staff.

The DL380 G4 will support 12GB of memory, and HP also makes it available with speeds as fast as 3.6GHz on dual-core Xeon processors and 2MB of Level 2 cache. The machine I tested had three 72GB Ultra 320 SCSI hard drives configured to the default of RAID 5 and 1GB of memory.

I installed Windows Server 2003 for this test, and other than enduring the tedium of installing Windows, about the only thing you have to do to get the DL380 running is to tell the BIOS on the embedded SCSI controller whether you want the installed drives configured as a RAID or as individual drives. That takes just a few seconds after making the menu choice on boot-up.

Serviceability with a smile

At this point, you have the opportunity to configure the network settings for the embedded iLO (Integrated Lights-Out) management system. You don't have to configure that to use the server, but you should do it before the server goes into service. iLO allows you to operate the server remotely, using a separate Ethernet adapter; it can be configured to use a completely separate network from the production system.