When Compaq introduced the ProLiant 6500, it was powered by the Pentium Pro CPU. Now that Xeon is king of the CPU hill, Compaq has upgraded the 6500. Priced at $24,525, the revised 6500 is an enterprise server that is a good bang for the buck.
The soul of the machine is its four 450-MHz Pentium II Xeon processors, each with 2M bytes of Level 2 cache - the fastest CPU subsystem we've tested. The unit complemented the CPU with 1G byte of memory, two dual-port 10/100 PCI Ethernet cards and six 4.3G-byte Ultra2 drives, which are controlled by a Compaq SmartArray 3200 and a two-channel Ultra2 RAID controller with 64M bytes of battery-backed cache. The four-way interleaved error checking and correcting memory must be added four dual in-line memory modules (DIMM) at a time. With its 16 DIMM slots populated with 256M-byte DIMMs, the 6500 supports a maximum of 4G bytes of memory.
The 6500 blazed through performance tests. It had the best CPU performance of any server we've ever tested, as measured by Blue Curve's Dynameasure SQL Professional 2.0.
Despite its top showing in our database test, the server's file subsystem performance was far from the best we've tested. It scored a little lower than the ProLiant 6000, which
we reviewed last year.
In a test to measure network adapter performance, we stressed the network interface card (NIC) using Ganymede Software's Chariot 2.2 net performance testing software. We set up four bidirectional streams of traffic that terminated in the server, balanced over two Fast Ethernet NICs. Each stream terminated at a separate client with a Fast Ethernet NIC. Half the streams simulated HTTP GIF requests and half simulated HTTP text requests.
We ran heavy TCP traffic across the network to generate a high number of TCP session setups and tear-downs, which stressed the processors until they reached nearly 100% utilization. The result was a test of the vendor's NIC hardware, NIC driver and CPU subsystem. The Chariot test resulted in a single number for network throughput. The ProLiant's showing of 102.5M bit/sec was about 7% higher than the comparably equipped server we used to develop the test.
The 6500 has a lot of options for card cages, hard disk connections and case configuration. This server has four open 64-bit PCI slots, offering plenty of bandwidth for I/O cards, though it does not have the onboard hot-plug drive feature of its cousins, the ProLiant 6000 and 7000.
The 6500 comes with Compaq Insight Manager, which monitors the hardware components and reports monitored values to many management platforms. The server also has an Integrated Management Display that shows common system information right on the server's front panel.
The 6500's Integrated Remote Console, together with a modem, gives you text-based remote access to the server for monitoring and rebooting it. Compaq also offers the optional Remote Insight Board, which has a modem, and allows for server monitoring, remote rebooting and console redirection. The board has a battery pack and A/C power inputs to remotely manage the server even when it is without power.
The serviceability of the 6500 is very good, but you need tools to remove the top cover to access all the system's components. Compaq says that because it removed the interlocks that shut down the server when the cover is opened, the firm designed a tooled entry for safety reasons. Removal of the interlocks is welcome news for users who like to run a server without the top cover. Two doors on top of the server let you access the system fans and I/O cards.
The ProLiant 6500 packs a lot of power and features in a small, easily serviced package.
RELATED LINKS
Scorecard and product specs
How we rated the server, plus vendor info.
Detailed results
Excel 5.0 spreadsheet with results and charts from our ProLiant testing.
Review: 4-CPU servers
Detailed testing of the ProLiant 6000 and five other Xeon-based servers. Network World, 10/19/98.
