How do I love thee, let me count the ways.

The 1300 is a sturdy little workgroup server. I deployed about a half a dozen of these boxes before the 2450 came out (read that review next). Each box's task has been network monitoring related. Two are deployed as Real Secure engines (NID), two are deployed as SNMP monitoring servers, and two are deployed as remote consoles situated in a WAN.

Dell has made great strides with "Alternative OS" vendors. A huge plus for me as I don't do NT (much.) Both RedHat Linux and Solaris x86 install without a hitch on the 1300s.

You do loose a bit by not going the extra $ or two with either the 2400 or 2450. For instance, the 1300 is not rack-mountable. It also doesn't have dual power supplies. You also don't get the ease of hot-swapable drives. What you do have the option to get, however, is the Perc2/SC. A terrific little raid controller. Configured with 3 drives two in RAID-1 and a third as a hotspare, you can easily minimize downtime due to a drive failure. In fact, your OS won't miss a beat (tested, and written about in my 2400 review).

These servers however were not built to be large scale fileservers. They were not built to be highly redundant. Its a workgroup server. If you have a nitch for the machine, it is more than ready to fill it.



Recommended: Yes