Product Review: The HP ProLiant ML30 Gen9 Tower Server
The HP ProLiant ML30 Gen9 Tower Server was designed with the SMB market in mind. This compact, affordable server is powerful enough to support your business today and flexible enough to easily scale as your company's needs change.
The HP ProLiant ML30 Gen9, released in December 2015 by Hewlett Packard's enterprise division (HPE), is a reliable standalone tower server ideal for file, print, web, IT and general business applications.
With its flexible, adaptable and easy-to-use management features—and an impressive storage capacity—the ML 30 is a great choice for remote branch offices and beyond, yet it's quiet enough for the front office.
Affordable, Efficient, Easy to Use
The ML30 Gen9, the successor to the ML310 Gen8V2, features simple management, better energy efficiency and enhanced storage tools, making it a better deal overall.
Also, with the transition of its server portfolio to HPE, HP has changed its naming conventions to make them more intuitive, increasing overall ease of use.
The ML30 incorporates Intel's Greenlow platform featuring the C236 Chipset and Xeon E3-1200 v5 processor family supporting two to four cores, as well as Intel's Pentium and Core I3 dual processors.
The processors support two memory channels with two slots each. With all four DIMM slots loaded with 16 GB DDR4 UDIMM modules, a maximum of 64 GBs of memory is available. Only EEC UDIMMs are supported, and depending on your processor, they can deliver transfer speeds of up to 2133 MT per second.
When it comes to storage, the ML30 offers several options. You can use eight SFF (Max 16 TB) or four LFF (Max 32TB) Hotplug SAS, SATA and SSD drives. With an LFF drive cage installed, each slot can support an 8-TB SATA hard drive for a maximum of 32 TBs of storage.
With eight SFF drives, up to 16 TBs of storage are available for applications. A media support kit is also available to support two additional LFF SATA drives in the media bay.
The ML30 comes standard with the HPE Dynamic Smart Array B140i HD controller. Other options include the Smart Array P440 or H240 HBA. The H240 also offers high performance with 12 GB per second data bandwidth and support for SAS, SATA and SSD drives. Four PCIe expansion slots support several different expansion cards including the optional storage controllers.
To enable enhanced graphics processing and even 3D rendering, a NVIDIA Quadrom K2200 GPU can be installed.
Exterior Access Options
On the front of the server, you have access to:
- A power button
- Two media drive bays
- Four USB 3.0 connections
- UID button/LED
- NIC Status LED
- Health LED
- Drive cages (LFF or SFF)
On the back of the server, you'll find:
- A video connector
- Two USB 2.0 connectors
- Two USB 3.0 connectors
- A NIC connector
- Four PCIe slots
The system comes with an entry-level HPE 350W power supply or 460W gold-rated Hotplug PSU. A redundant 460W gold-rated PSU is optional, using HPE's redundant power supply cage.
Management of the system is handled by the HPE iLO Management Engine, a standard embedded feature on all ProLiant server products. This system features agentless management, active health system, intelligent provisioning and embedded remote support.
Purchasing the HP ProLiant M30
Aventis Systems offers several customizable configurations of the HP ProLiant ML30 Gen9 Server including:
