Inspur EIS800S Fanless Edge Server Review

A few weeks ago, we reviewed the Inspur EIS800E. That was an interesting edge server, but it was actively cooled. There has another variant, the Inspur EIS800S which is the version we are reviewing today. Through this review, we were able to see the company’s strategy in edge systems based on the Intel Atom C3000 series.

Inspur EIS800S Fanless Edge Appliance Hardware Overview

The Inspur EIS800S comes in a fanless chassis. This is designed for edge deployments that also have fairly substantial networking requirements. Something that will become immediately obvious to those who saw our EIS800E review is that this is the same I/O configuration.

There are four USB 3 ports and a VGA port for local management. For networking, there are both two 10Gbase-T and two SFP+ ports for four 10GbE links in total. There is even an out-of-band management port.

While the microcenter node is the EIS800E that we reviewed previously, this “EIS800S” is the Standard Node in the family. This is not the outdoor node that has different weatherization enhancements.

On the side of the EIS800S, we can see various headers for wireless antennas.

We can see a similar layout on the opposite side. These can be used for WiFi, 4G/5G, and more. One will also notice a SIM card slot and that there are Zigbee options.

At the rear of the unit, we can see a power supply port, a grounding point, and a headphone jack.

Here is the top of the unit where we can see the status LEDs along with the power and reset buttons.

Next, let us get inside the system to see how it is built.

Inspur EIS800S Half-Width Edge Server Internal Overview

Inside the system, it was much harder to access due to it being a fanless design. In this type of design, the chassis acts as a large heatsink to help cool components without internal fans. Here is a view from the 10GbE port side of the chassis with the faceplate off.

Here is the power supply side of the platform.

In this system there is an Intel Atom C3558R is housed on a COMe module with two SODIMM slots.

Since we were a bit worried about breaking something, here is the motherboard with the COMe module uninstalled in the EIS800E.

One can see the out-of-band management is provided by a SODIMM-like module that houses the ASPEED BMC. That replaceable module also makes it easy to remove the out-of-band management features or to use a different management module. Two M.2 slots can be used for storage or AI accelerators. Our system had a 64GB eMMC solution as well so that one does not need to use M.2 for OS storage.

Next, let us look at the system’s topology.