HPE’s ProLiant DL345 Gen11 is a 2U single-socket (1P) rack server with a few surprises up its sleeve. Along with support for AMD’s core-heavy Gen4 EPYC CPUs plus fast DDR5 memory, its storage potential makes it a great choice for businesses with big virtualization and capacity plans that want to avoid the expense of a 2P server.
Its predecessor, the DL345 Gen10 Plus, had plenty to say in the storage department, but the DL345 Gen11 adds new mid-tray and rear cage options that boost the number of bays to a maximum of 20 LFF or 34 SFF drives. There’s more as HPE also offers new front cage options that support up to 36 EDSFF E3.S NVMe SSD storage devices.
HPE ProLiant DL345 Gen11 review: Storage options
HPE pulled out all the stops for our review system as it supplied it with 32 SATA SFF SSDs. The standard 8+8+8 drive bay box configuration presented 24 drives at the front and we had the midtray fitted which added another eight drives.
The space above the dual PSU bay can be used for HPE’s optional stacked dual SFF cage and the tri-mode backplanes for all configurations support SAS, SATA, and NVMe devices. For LFF drives, you have room for up to twelve at the front, and four in the mid-plane and if you’re prepared to sacrifice some PCIe expansion slots, you can add another four at the rear.
The motherboard has four integrated SATA ports but the embedded SR100i RAID controller found in the DL345 Gen10 Plus is no longer present, so you’ll need to specify one of HPE’s SR (SmartRAID) or MR (MegaRAID) storage controllers. There are plenty to choose from and our system came with HPE’s top-dog SR932i-p Gen11 tri-mode PCIe card which supports 6G SATA, 24G SAS, and 16G NVMe drives plus virtually all known RAID array types and has 8GB of battery-protected cache memory.
The server supports HPE’s NS204i-u Gen11 boot optimized storage device which is worth considering if you want all your standard bays free for data storage. Slipping neatly into a small dedicated bay above the PSUs, it presents two hot-plug M.2 NVMe SSDs at the rear and provides mirrored redundant storage for running an OS or hypervisor.
HPE ProLiant DL345 Gen11 review: Is it worth it?
HPE’s ProLiant DL345 Gen11 is an incredibly versatile 1P rack server at a very tempting price. The combination of core-heavy AMD EPYC CPU and DDR5 memory make it a cost-effective virtualization platform while its outstanding expansion potential will appeal to businesses looking for a rack-dense high-capacity storage solution.
Post time: Nov-09-2024
