Inspur EIS800S Fanless Edge Server Review

Inspur EIS800S Topology

Here is the system’s topology:

This is a fairly simple topology with the quad-core CPU, networking devices on PCIe, the 64GB onboard eMMC (mmcblk0), and the M.2 SSD. The NICs are the Intel X553 for SFP+ and the X550 for 10Gbase-T.

There are a few different variations on the EIS800S but we are looking at the Basic Interface version in this review.

Let us next cover management and performance quickly.

Inspur EIS800E Management

Inspur’s primary management is via IPMI and Redfish APIs. We have shown this before, so we are not going to go into too much extra, but we will have a recap here. That is what most hyperscale and CSP customers will utilize to manage their systems. Inspur also includes a robust and customized web management platform with its management solution.

There are key features we would expect from any modern server. These include the ability to power cycle a system and remotely mount virtual media. Inspur also has a HTML5 iKVM solution that has these features included. Some other server vendors do not have fully-featured HTML5 iKVM, including virtual media support, as of this review being published.

Based on comments in our previous articles, many of our readers have not used an Inspur Systems server and therefore have not seen the management interface. We have an 8-minute video clicking through the interface and doing a quick tour of the Inspur Systems management interface:

It is certainly not the most entertaining subject, however, if you are considering these systems, you may want to know what the web management interface is on each machine and that tour can be helpful.

Next, let us discuss performance.

Intel Atom C3558R Performance: Inspur EIS800E

The Intel Atom C3558R powering this system is the “refresh” or “R” version of the Intel Atom C3558. For a quick comparison from our Intel Atom C3000 Line Quietly Refreshed piece:

In the context of many CPUs, 200MHz is not a huge increase. In the context of the Intel Atom C3000 line this is about a 9% clock speed boost on the four low-power cores. The result is that we get notably better performance:

Overall, these are very close figures, but it is nice that Inspur is using the refresh SKUs here since they do seem to offer more performance.

We also just want to point out that the SKUs also have a maximum of 2x 10GbE, which is important since lower-end SKUs do not have that level of networking available. We tested the 10GbE speeds at line rate performance using iperf3, which is what we would expect.

We also now have the Intel Atom P5322 in (as some folks may have seen in a recent video), so we are just starting to see Snow Ridge parts be used more broadly, but we are still very early in that cycle.

Next, let us get to the power consumption, STH Server Spider, and our final words.