Inspur EIS800E Half-Width Edge Server Review

Inspur EIS800E Power Consumption

The power consumption of the Inspur EIS800E really surprised us. As one can see, the unit shipped with a 250W swappable power supply, but as a single PSU offering, this is not redundant.

Power consumption on this was very good, sitting right around 10W at idle. We could push the system to just above 20W in the configuration shown without networking at 10GbE speeds. Adding SFP+ optics and the 10Gbase-T links added another ~10W of power. Those are some ballpark figures to work with. From there, the rear of the chassis has both the OCP NIC 3.0 slot and a PICe slot that can be used for expansion. Those have the potential to add significantly more power to this system.

STH Server Spider: Inspur EIS800E

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.

This is far from the largest server. Instead of intending to be the densest server around, the machine is focused on adding low-power compute to the edge. For that, it serves its purpose with a special focus on edge networking. As we showed in our review, networking here is a standout feature.

Final Words

This is one of those really interesting edge systems for two reasons. First is simply the rich set of features that we get in a system like this, including 4x 10GbE built-in networking, IPMI, multiple wireless, storage, and add-in NIC options, along with the Intel Atom C3758R. Second, the system is part of the overall Inspur EIS800 family that spans a number of different form factors. We are looking at a more standalone form factor here, but Inspur has the ability to add 4x NVIDIA Jetson AI modules or stack these half-width systems in a rack to make dense compute clusters at the edge.

Overall, the Inspur EIS800E performed well for us, and the ability to expand and customize the system was refreshing in this space.

As we have mentioned, the EIS800 comes in different form factors. As a bit of foreshadowing, stay tuned for a review of another version of the EIS800 platform in the near future on STH.