The ThinkSystem ST250 is a office-friendly tower server that has been optimized to provide enterprise-class features to small businesses, retail, educational institutions and branch offices.

Scalability and performance

The ST250 offers the following features to boost performance, improve scalability, and reduce costs:

• The Intel Xeon E-2100 Series processors improves productivity by offering affordable single-socket system performance with 6-core processors with up to 3.8 GHz core speeds.
• Intelligent and adaptive system performance with Intel Turbo Boost Technology 2.0 allows processor cores to run at maximum speeds during peak workloads by temporarily going beyond processor thermal design power (TDP).
• Intel Hyper-Threading Technology boosts performance for multithreaded applications by enabling simultaneous multithreading within each processor core, up to two threads per core.
• Intel Virtualization Technology integrates hardware-level virtualization hooks that allow operating system vendors to better use the hardware for virtualization workloads.
• Up to four 2666 MHz DDR4 ECC or non-ECC UDIMMs provide speed and capacity of up to 64 GB.
• The server offers PCI Express 3.0 I/O expansion capabilities that increase the theoretical maximum bandwidth by almost 100% (8 GTps per link using 128b/130b encoding) compared to the PCI Express 2.0 (5 GTps per link using 8b/10b encoding).
• With Intel Integrated I/O Technology, the PCI Express 3.0 controller is integrated into the Intel Xeon E-2100 Series processors. Such integration reduces I/O latency and increases overall system performance.
• The 12 Gbps SAS internal storage connectivity doubles the data transfer rate compared to 6 Gb SAS solutions to maximize performance of storage I/O-intensive applications.
• Flexible storage configurations support either 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch hot-swap drive bays or a combination of the two (hybrid configuration). Drive bays support SAS and SATA HDDs and SSDs.
  • Up to 16x 2.5-inch hot-swap drive bays
  • Up to 8x 3.5-inch hot-swap drive bays
  • Up to 4x 3.5-inch + 8x 2.5-inch drive bays
  • Up to 8x 3.5-inch simple-swap drive bays
• The use of solid-state drives (SSDs) instead of, or along with, traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) can significantly improve I/O performance. An SSD can support up to 100 times more I/O operations per second (IOPS) than a typical HDD.
• New high-speed RAID controllers from Broadcom provide 12 Gb SAS connectivity to the drive backplanes. A variety of RAID adapters are available, with cache up to 4 GB and support for 20 drives on a single controller.
• Offers two 5.25-inch media bays with support for optical drives or backup drives.
• Supports a single M.2 drive as an additional storage/boot device.
• The server has two integrated Gigabit Ethernet ports.
• The server offers PCI Express 3.0 I/O expansion capabilities that improve the theoretical maximum bandwidth by almost 100% (8 GT/ps per link using 128b/130b encoding) compared to the previous generation of PCI Express 2.0 (5 GT/s per link using 8b/10b encoding).
• The server offers up to four PCIe 3.0 I/O expansion slots
• Support for a NVIDIA graphics processing unit (GPU) to enhanced graphics.

Manageability and security