3.5 To 5.25 Adapter

Lenovo chases SMBs with Xeon E3 towers

Server maker Lenovo is one of the first vendors out the door with entry tower servers aimed at small and medium businesses based on Intel's "Sandy Bridge-DT" Xeon E3-1200 processors.

The Xeon E3 chips are designed for single-socket servers and workstations. They were previewed by Intel back in March and started shipping in early April for both servers and for workstations with Intel's HD Graphics 3000 GPUs embedded on certain models of the chips.

All of the chips have four cores except for the 20 watt E3-1220L, which has two cores. The remaining Xeon E3 models run at between 2.4GHz and 3.5GHz and have power draws of between 45 and 95 watts. The chips make use of the "Cougar Point" series of chipsets from Intel.

Lenovo was initially reselling selected models of IBM's System x tower and rack servers in the wake of acquiring IBM's PC business a few years back, but has been doing its own server design and manufacturing more recently. The company is also partnering with Intel to be an early adopter of the AppUp Small Business Service, which was announced in May and which brings cloud-style utility pricing for servers and applications to x64 servers installed at SMB shops .

Oddly enough, Lenovo is using an earlier ThinkServer TS200v tower server as the basis for its AppUp offering rather than the new TS130 and TS430 machines – and you can probably chalk that up to the delays in deliveries of Sandy Bridge entry servers in the wake of the bug that was discovered in the Cougar Point chipsets back in January.

The TS130 tower server is based on the C206 version of the Cougar Point chipset, and like other Xeon E3 machines, only has four DDR3 memory slots on its system board. At this time, Lenovo is only support 2GB or 4GB memory sticks in the box, for a maximum of 16GB of memory. But there is no reason you can't quadruple that memory using much more expensive 16GB memory sticks if you have a lot of cash laying around. Lenovo is putting ECC memory in the box for increased reliability, and is also using the RAID data protection cooked into the C206 chipset and SATA disk ports to provide mirroring for disks.

The TS130 has two 3.5-inch media bays (and supports up to 4TB of capacity) and two SATA-III ports running at 6Gb/sec and two SATA ports running at 3Gb/sec on its system board. Lenovo is peddling 7,200 RPM SATA drives with 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities. Lenovo is also offering internal USB or external RDX data backup cartridges with 160GB, 320GB, or 500GB capacities as well as de-deuplicating backup software to make use of these RDX cartridges, which have 2.5-inch disks embedded inside of them.

SilverStone CFP52B 5.25-Inch to 3.5-Inch Bay Converter with Hot ...

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