HPE ProLiant DL145 Gen11 Review An AMD EPYC 8004 Edge Server

HPE ProLiant DL145 Gen11 Power Consumption

Power consumption was a very exciting story. We originally saw our HPE 700W 80Plus Platinum power supply and thought this might use quite a bit of power even with low power components.

At idle, we saw the system at 110W which was impressive for a system with this configuration.

Of that, around 28-29W was the 48-core processor package. Something we also noted was that HPE spins the fans down quite a bit at idle to save power. Other systems might run fans slightly harder to increase idle cooling.

Running the system we saw HPE configured this system to hit a limit of 300W in the configuration that HPE shipped. As we played with augmenting the configuration, we were able to achieve higher power consumption using more of that big power supply. Still, 300W for 48 cores, a NVIDIA L4 GPU (that was idling but still taking some power at 300W), dual 10GbE NIC, four SSDs, and two sticks of DDR5 is great.

That took the package being limited to the 180-185W range.

HPE, of course, has some great power monitoring and also the ability to set power limits in the BIOS. In edge deployments, power can be tight, and so being able to fit configurations in tight power limits is useful.

STH Server Spider: HPE ProLiant DL145 Gen11

In the second half of 2018, we introduced the STH Server Spider as a quick reference to where a server system’s aptitude lies. Our goal is to start giving a quick visual depiction of the types of parameters that a server is targeted at.

Although this is a short-depth server with up to 64 cores, we use rack height as our density metric. There is a decent amount of NVMe storage, PCIe expansion for AI accelerators or networking, and even the EPYC 8004 processor with up to 64 cores. On the other hand, this is a system designed to have some of all of those devices, and not necessarily be optimized for a single type of role, such as a high-density AI server or storage server. That is really the point as a device a step above the EPYC 4004 series but below the expandability of the EPYC 9004/ 9005 series platforms.

Final Words

What a cool little server. If you are a HPE shop, then this is going to be a great edge server to deploy. The AMD EPYC 8004 series offers a lot of connectivity while also offering fairly high core counts at a low power consumption level. For those outside of the HPE ecosystem, some of the HPE-specific eccentricities like the system checking for HPE brand RAM, iLO, and so forth might be a deal breaker, but they are also expected in the HPE ecosystem. In either case, this is a neat hardware package where the EPYC 8004 is really showing what it is capable of.

Delivering low power consumption, great performance, and great connectivity along with HPE’s management and security is certainly a winning combination for the edge.