Fujitsu Primergy TX1310 M1 – the workhorse Xeon server for SMEs on a budget

Can any more be said about small business servers these days? Normally we’d say not, but Fujitsu’s Xeon E3-1226-equipped Primergy dumped itself on our testing desk with a startling price tag of only £499 (£349 on promotion at eBuyer inc VAT) piquing our interest.

On the face of it, a small business is getting a lot for its CAPEX budget with this system, even once the cost of support and a volume OS license is added to the final bill. Within Fujitsu’s extensive line-up of tower servers, the TX100 series is the entry-level system, with the TX1310 occupying the middle of three tiers within that.

The TX1310 system supplied had 8GB of DDR3 1600HMz RAM in a single module (the Fujitsu site specifies 2 x 4GB for some reason), with a single spare slot on the motherboard, the maximum being 32GB. Frankly, this need to be doubled unless it’s being used for a basic tasks such as a print server, although the cost mentioned above includes that spec.

Fixed storage was in the form of 2 x 500GB SATA 6GB drives configured for RAID 1 mirroring and a DVD-RW drive, eight USB sockets, four being USB 3.0, two of which were at the front of the unit. Again, upping this to 2 x 1TB drives would be advisable (also included in the above price), which offers 1TB of capacity with RAID. Other features include the Intel I350-T2 Ethernet LAN card with dual Gigabit ports and on/off switches on the front and rear of the case.

The system ships with Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard pre-installed with Fujitsu ServerView Suite.