It looks like HPE has gotten into the standalone Intel Xeon D server market as well. The HPE ProLiant EC200a has an onboard Intel Xeon D-1518 SoC to deliver a lower-end hybrid cloud solution. With its small form factor, and Zynstra’s hybrid cloud solution, HPE is catering to the SMB market that needs both an on premise server as well as cloud services. HPE ProLiant EC200a uses Zynstra’s Hybrid IT platform to provide a cloud managed solution with out of the box integration to Microsoft Office365 and Azure. HPE has been pushing its ProLiant Easy Connect line for the SMB market where the technical expertise may not be available to manage a hybrid cloud environment.

The base unit is meant to be compact and therefore has room for two LFF hard drives, an m.2 drive and up to two DDR4 RDIMMs. We were surprised to see that HPE decided not to take full advantage of the platform and allow a full 4x DIMM slot option. On the other hand, with the 4 core/ 8 thread Intel Xeon D-1518 SoC 128GB of RAM may be an overkill in intended applications. We also noticed that HPE is not utilizing the dual 10GbE MAC (Intel X552/ X557) found on the Intel Xeon D SoC, instead opting for traditional 1GbE NICs.

One interesting option is that these units have what amounts to a 4x 3.5″ disk shelf specific to the platform for those using 6x 3.5″ hard drives.

The Intel Xeon D SoC supports 6x SATA III devices so this box will help take advantage of all six SATA ports the platform offers.

HPE ProLiant EC200a Key Specs

Processor: Intel Xeon Processor D-1518 quad core. See our Intel Xeon D-1518 benchmarks and review here

Memory: Up to 64GB (2x DDR4 RDIMM slots)

Storage: (2) LFF SATA, non-hot plug M.2 SSD – four more LFF SATA drives via a unique expansion box.

Network Controller: 2x1GbE embedded Storage Controller Intel Embedded SATA Controller, controller for iLO management

Warranty: 3/3/3 Server Warranty includes three years of parts, three year of labor, three year of onsite support coverage.

You can find more information on the HPE ProLiant EC200a here. You can find out more information on the Zynstra solution here.