Lenovo ThinkSystem ST550
Not the most expandable platform in the world, but a solid, easy-to-deploy server for moderate workloads
SCORE PRICE As reviewed, £1,809 exc VAT from ebuyer.com
The ThinkSystem family is barely more than a year old, but it’s established Lenovo as a force to be reckoned with in the server market – and the new ThinkSystem ST550 is well worth a look if you need a fuss-free server to handle your everyday apps along with file, print and web serving.
For the price, it’s a great hardware package. There’s an eight-core 2.1GHz Xeon Silver 4110 in the driving seat, and a spare socket for a second CPU for when you want to boost your parallel processing. The chassis has a comparatively low 125W TDP limitation, but it supports all Bronze, Silver and Gold 5100 CPUs, plus Gold 6100 models with up to 20 cores.
The price also covers 16GB of TruDDR4 RDIMM memory, and 12 DIMM slots allow this to be boosted to a maximum of 768GB in dual-CPU configurations – or double that with the forthcoming option to move up to 128GB DIMMs.
The chassis feels reassuringly solid and offers very flexible storage options. Our system came with an eight-bay hot-swap SFF backplane, with room for a second above; you can fit a total of 20 SFF drives (using optional cages which occupy the two 5.25in expansion bays), or up to eight LFF disks. Four super-fast PCI-E NVMe SSDs can also be installed by replacing the standard SFF cage with Lenovo’s AnyBay module, which uses an NVMe switch adapter fitted in the second expansion slot to connect the drives directly to the first CPU.
RAID options start with the basic Intel RSTe controller, which supports up to eight SATA drives in striped, mirrored and RAID5 arrays. Our test system came with Lenovo’s own RAID 930-8i card, which adds support for 12Gbits/sec SAS3 connections, plus RAID6 support and a potentially valuable 2GB of battery protected cache. Note that since it only has eight SAS3 ports, it’s fine for managing the supplied SFF backplane, but if you want to add further drives you’ll need a second RAID card. For increased future-proofing, consider specifying the 16-port or 24-port versions of the RAID 930 card, so extra disks can be simply plugged in as and when the time comes.
“Maintenance and upgrades are a breeze, as the interior of the server is nice and tidy, with easy access to all the key areas”
If you’re shopping for your first server, you’ll be pleased to know that getting set up is a piece of cake, thanks to Lenovo’s XClarity Provisioning Manager. This guided us through the process of configuring a RAID array, and helped us get Windows Server 2016 running in less than 30 minutes.
Maintenance and upgrades are a breeze too, as the interior of the server is nice and tidy, with easy access to all the key areas. Dual Gigabit Ethernet ports are built in, and the six available PCI-Express slots give you plenty of room to install additional 10-Gigabit adapters, should you need to boost your networking bandwidth.
The final piece of the puzzle is Lenovo’s XClarity Controller (XCC), a management platform that puts the ST550 up there alongside HPE’s iLO5 and Dell’s iDRAC9 for remote management features. The web interface delivers all the information you could want about system health and critical components, with friendly coloured graphs showing resource utilisation and system-wide power usage. To get the best from it, you’ll need an Advanced licence, which adds power management graphs, remote control, virtual media services plus OS provisioning; it would be nice if those things came as standard, but for a mere £23 per year it’s hard to complain. Other valuable features of the XCC include automated firmware update tools and a range of options to set access security.
If you’re nervous about moving to an in-house server, you can rest easy with the ThinkSystem ST550. It’s wonderfully straightforward to set up, ticks all the important boxes and gives you a decent degree of scope for future expansion.
SPECIFICATIONS 2.1GHz Xeon Silver 4110 processor (max 2) 16GB 2,400MHz DDR4 (max 768GB)ThinkSystem RAID 930-8i/2GB cache/BBU supports RAID0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60 2 x 300GB 10K SAS3 SFF hard disks (max 20) 2 x Gigabit Ethernet 6 x PCI-Express 3 750W hot-plug PSU (max 2) XClarity Advanced with Gigabit Ethernet 177 x 670 x 440mm (WDH) max 125W TDP 3yr on-site NBD warranty