HP 658553-001 ProLiant N40L Ultra Micro Tower Server System AMD Turion II Neo N40L 1.5GHz 2C 2GB (1 x 2GB) 1 x 250GB LFF SATA

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Price: $379.99 $348.99   

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• HP ISS 658553-001 HP MICRO G7 N40L NHP US SVR

Product Description

HP ISS HP Micro G7 N40L NHP US SvrHP Micro G7 N40L NHPUS Svr

HP 658553-001 ProLiant N40L Ultra Micro Tower Server System AMD Turion II Neo N40L 1.5GHz 2C 2GB (1 x 2GB) 1 x 250GB LFF SATA Review

I bought this to use as a NAS / VMWare server

Also got 8GB ECC memory which is the max this server supports, booting VMWare ESXi off a USB, then running OpenIndiana + Napp-It off of a SSD and then running ZFS on in RAID-Z1 (equivalent to RAID-5, I use RAID-Z instead of hardware RAID so I'm protected from the RAID-5 write hole and silent data corruption) across 3x2TB 7200RPM Seagate drives (also use part of the SSD is an L2ARC - a cache that keeps the most frequently accessed data on the SSD) which is shared back to VMWare as an NFS share so any other VM's installed on the box can be backed by ZFS redundancy. I did raw device mapping for the three drives so that OpenIndiana has direct access to them. This means I could easily export and import the pool into another system.

The Solaris version of Crashplan works very well on OI, to backup the entire zpool to a remote offsite location. It was a little tricky, Crashplan didn't see my zpool folder at first but I was able to manually add it to the config file and then it showed up in the gui.

The hardware is good for the price, there's a network, hdd, and power led lights on the front. A very large fan on the back means it runs very quiet. One gigabit network, a VGA port, and lots of USB ports are available if you ever need them.

Tips:
- Download VMWare ESXi off of HP's site which includes better HP specific hardware.
- I also tested Oracle Solaris 11 and Nexenta. Solaris 11 was the fastest, but requires a $1000/year support contract for non-personal/development use. OpenIndiana was the second fastest but hasn't officially released a stable version (however I found it more stable than NexentaStor). NexentaStor (free up to 18TB) is used in production by many enterprises so I tried using it first, but it became sluggish after I had a few thousand snapshots (the ZFS layer was fine, it was Nexenta's gui interface that couldn't handle it, probably would have been fine with a faster CPU). So for me OI + Napp-It works best, but if I weren't running a business I'd do Solaris 11 + Napp-it since it had the best performance on this machine.
- The ICY DOCK MB882SP-1S-2B will adapt an SSD drive to fit into the drive caddie trays perfectly.
- the CPU is adequate for a NAS, but it's not that fast, so for Crashplan I set data deduplication to minimal and compression to automatic. I found uploads went much faster this way. ZFS didn't have much of a slowdown using the default ZFS compression (and in some tests was faster with compression enabled) so I left it on. ZFS Deduplication slowed it down considerably even with 8GB memory.
- Use the VMXNET3 network driver instead of the E1000 for better performance. I could'n't get the guest tools to install automatically but you can ssh into the ESXi server and grab the solaris.iso off of it.

Things I've run in VMWare on top of ZFS storage on this box using Ubuntu and FreeBSD VMs without problems:
- Openswan IPSec server (for Android / iOS devices)
- Media Server for streaming videos and music (MiniDLNAa and Subsonic)
- Mail server - POP/IMAP/SMTP
- Web Server - Apache / Wordpress
- Nagios
- Mumble Server
- Minecraft Server

Things I really like:
- Supports ECC Memory (hard to find on a box this cheap) which is essential for data integrity.
- Small form factor
- Big fan, near silent operation

Wishlist for things I'd like to see in future editions of this model (although I'm sure not all of them could be done at this price-point).
- Faster CPU
- Support for more drives, get rid of drive bay, make it a little taller and this thing could hold 8" 3.5 drives or 18 2.5" drives.
- A special mounting area for an SSD.
- LED indicators for each drive.
- Remove RAID controller and only support JBOD and have more than 5 SATA ports.
- Built in KVM controller (currently you can buy one).
- 10Gigabit ethernet
- HDMI video (for people that want to use it as a home media server)
- Audio out (for subsonic media server, this could drive household speakers)
- Hot Swap Drive Bays

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