In life there are always unsung heroes, people who do a job that nobody really ­appreciates.

That is to say, nobody appreciates this work until they realise they can’t live without it. Servers are a lot like this. 

They sit on a rack in some cold stark room that is ­seldom visited by the ordinary folks. They work day and night. Information is constantly requested of them and seldom do they fail to ­instantly return results. We rarely ­consider these devices as we surf the net or even host our own websites – yet the world literally comes to a stand still when we encounter a crashed or failed server.  Essentially servers are the house-elves of the hardware world.

The HP ProLiant DL385 G2 is our unsung hero. This beast of a machine serves ­TechSmart.co.za and does a damn fine job of it. It is ­uncomplaining, always working and truly reliable. It boasts excellent manageability and enterprise-class uptime. It is a rack-mounted server with 2U ­density which basically allows for a variety of rack ­deployments and/or ­applications.

The DL 385 is powerful and flexible. It runs on a 2 processor AMD Opteron with the option to upgrade to a Quad-Core processor. It has support for DDR2 Memory, with a max memory of 32GB, and for Serial Attached SCSI drives with SAS controller. It also features iLO (integrated Lights-Out) which is useful for remote management. It even has an additional PCI-Express slot for HBAs, SCSI Controllers, which allows for expanded storage options. Basically it is a ­serious bit of kit.

But, the DL 385 is not only ideal for ­enterprise. It is versatile enough to meet the remote management, ­database ­storage or information backup needs of small and medium businesses as well. In fact this server will meet the needs of just about any business which seeks to operate in a rack ­environment. So the next time you’re ­surfing TechSmart.co.za take a little time out to think about the outstanding job our server is doing.

Visit www.hp.com/servers/proliantdl385 or contact Rory Green on 011-785-1261 for more info