New CPU sizzles in servers

We're really on the cutting edge here. All the enterprise-class servers in this test boast the new four-way Pentium II Xeon processors, the fastest processors available from Intel. Despite that, the performance of these products varies greatly, as do the features.

The Compaq ProLiant 6000 took the top spot because of its easy expandability and top-flight performance. It edged out the Hewlett-Packard LXr 8000, with the Dell PowerEdge 6300 a close third in overall score. The Tangent Enterprise NX-Q, Gateway ALR 9200 and Micron Electronics NetFRAME 6200 were well behind the top three, lacking features and lagging in performance. The Tangent, Gateway and Micron products are surprisingly similar in that they have identical case designs.

The Compaq server rated the highest on our Score Card. It placed second in performance overall, as a result of being first in the Web tests, third in the SQL tests, and second in the file tests.

The ProLiant 6000 is designed with expandability in mind. The case has room for three hard drive cages that can hold six 1-inch or four 1.6-inch drives. The 6000 comes standard with one cage occupied. A ProLiant 6000 with all three drive cages occupied has the capacity for 18 internal hot-swappable drives. The server also supports three hot-swappable load-balancing power supplies, though our evaluation unit had just one.

The ProLiant has nine PCI slots, five of which are 64-bit slots on one bus, and four of which are 32-bit slots on two other separate busses. The Pro-Liant 6000 does not have hot-plug PCI capability.

The case has a cableless SCSI signal path to allow the drive cages to connect directly to a three-channel UltraWide SCSI SmartArray 3100ES array controller. The array controller has 64M bytes of onboard battery-backed cache. The array controller also allows failover redundancy with the addition of a second array controller card.

Our unit was shipped with six 4.3G-byte disks for a total of 25.8G bytes of storage. The RAID controller was configured for RAID 0 disk striping.

The server had the next to largest form factor of the servers reviewed, behind HP's two-box design, and was the largest stand-alone product. All that space helps provide excellent accessibility to the internal components.

The server has a front panel display for system management information. In the event of hardware failure, the server can automatically reboot and page the administrator. For remote access, the unit includes an internal remote console to monitor and control the server via modem access. The management hardware has hooks to integrate with HP OpenView, Computer Associates International's Unicenter, Cabletron's Spectrum and Tivoli TME.

Also included is Compaq Insight Manager, an application that helps anticipate server hardware failure, and SmartStart, which automates system configuration and operating system installation.

The Hewlett-Packard LXr 8000 has a different design from all other servers in this review. The server is packaged in two parts, the LXr 8000 and a Rack Storage/8 (RS/8) disk backplane unit. Both are housed in one 19-inch rack.

HP took the second spot in overall score because of its strong showing in features and manageability. It was also a good performer, coming in third in overall performance. By category, it scored a close third in the file tests, fourth in the SQL tests and fourth in the Web tests.

The RS/8 has space for eight hot-swappable drives. Our unit had eight 1-inch 9.1G-byte UltraWide drives. The LXr 8000 has a capacity for two hot-swappable drives. Ours held just one 9.1G-byte drive. The drive bays in the LXr 8000 are hot-swappable. This feature gives the combined unit a capacity for 10 hot-swappable drives. Half the drives in the RS/8 were partitioned for use with Windows NT 4.0 and the other half for NetWare 4.11.

Our LXr 8000 had a NetRAID 3SI three-channel Ultra2 LVD array controller. One channel was used to control the RS/8. The array controller was configured for RAID 0. The LXr 8000 also has an onboard dual-channel Ultra2 LVD controller.

The server features automatic server reboot to restart the machine in the event of an operating system lockup. It also offers full remote control features through a combination of hardware, firmware and software. HP's bundled TopTools software allows an administrator to control and monitor the server's operation.

The TopTools Remote Control Card comes standard on the LXr 8000. It lets the administrator access the server's management console via LAN or modem, and has console redirection, power cycle and power-up features, and online memory diagnostics. The TopTools Remote Control Card comes with a battery backup and has an optional AC power adapter - if the server loses power, the card draws its power from the AC adapter. If the AC adapter loses power, the battery backup kicks in.

The Dell PowerEdge 6300 came in a close third. It finished first in the SQL and file tests and came in second in the Web tests. Its overall ranking was hurt by a comparative lack of expandability in the unit. The unit can house only six hot-swappable drives. An anticipated external disk array shelf should increase the server's ability to support more drives.

The PowerEdge comes with seven hot-pluggable PCI slots; four are 64-bit and three are 32-bit. The unit has a drive shelf with room for six 1-inch or 1.6-inch hot-swappable drives. Behind the bezel there are two 1-inch drive slots that don't support hot swaps. Controlling three RAID drives is a PERC-32 dual-channel UltraWide SCSI array controller. The controller has 32M bytes of battery-backed cache and the ability to incorporate additional drives on a SCSI channel without having to reboot. The motherboard includes a built-in dual Ultra2 LVD SCSI controller and a single channel UltraNarrow SCSI controller for the CD-ROM drive.

The case, which can be mounted in a 19-inch rack, supports three hot-swappable load-balancing power supplies. Two power supplies are needed to operate the server, and a third power supply provides redundancy in case one of the others dies. The case is easy to assemble and disassemble; a toolless design with a sliding cage allows easy access to all components.

The compact Dell server requires a small amount of floor space or a relatively small amount of rack space. The system had the sturdiest and easiest to use drive carriers of all the servers shipped. The layout of the drive bays is especially well thought-out, maintaining the ease of use whether mounted on wheels or in a rack.

The 6300 features automatic server reboot if the server operating system hangs.

Dell packages its four management tools into a bundle called Dell OpenManage. Server Console allows administrators to manage a PowerEdge server from another PowerEdge server. Client Administrator allows administrators to communicate with Desktop Manage-ment Interface (DMI) Version 2.0-compliant hardware. Hardware Instrumentation Pack, a software package, works with certain components of server hardware to allow simpler management of Windows NT and NetWare servers. The optional Dell Remote Assistant Card 2 enables administration and management from remote locations. It provides out-of-band access to the server for management through a modem or serial terminal, allowing an administrator to power down, reboot, and monitor the system.

The management software has hooks called OpenManage Connections to integrate the PowerEdge 6300 into Tivoli TME, HP OpenView Network Node Manager (NNM) for Solaris, and IBM's NetView for AIX and Windows NT.

The ALR 9200 tied for fourth in the overall standings and fifth in overall performance. It placed fifth in the Web and file tests and fourth in the SQL tests.

The ALR 9200 motherboard has six PCI slots and one shared PCI and ISA slot. The case can hold six 1-inch hot-swappable drives.

Our unit was shipped with an ALR Disk Array Controller A-466 Ultra2 single-channel RAID controller and three 9G-byte drives. The Gateway server was the only server we tested that had one four-port Fast Ethernet network interface card, rather than four single-port NICs. This configuration helps avoid a resource crunch; the server uses only two PCI slots for the four Fast Ethernet ports and the array controller.

The server comes with an integrated server management platform that monitors the CPUs, fan, RAID, SCSI bus, disk operations, temperature, voltages and case intrusion. Alerts are processed through network broadcast, DMI or SNMP trap. System management utilities, configuration aid and diagnostic software are shipped with the server.

The case is identical to the Tangent and Micron cases and provides adequate space for the components, but it is not particularly easy to access and has no special features. The drive carriers are flimsy and difficult to insert into the drive bays. It provides a bezel lock.

The Tangent Enterprise NX-Q tied for fourth in overall score and placed fourth in performance. The Tangent server had a strong second-place showing in the SQL tests. It placed third in the Web tests and fourth in the file tests. We chalk up the disparity to the server's good CPU and memory design but its somewhat slower disk subsystem, which our file server tests emphasize highly.

The Tangent Enterprise NX-Q has six PCI slots and one shared PCI and ISA slot. Our test unit had 512M bytes of memory - the lowest of the servers reviewed, which likely hurt its performance. The case holds six 1-inch hot-swappable drives. Our unit came with three 9.1G-byte drives.

The motherboard has a built-in dual-channel UltraWide controller and a single-channel UltraNarrow controller. In our evaluation server, Tangent included an AMI 438 three-channel Ultra2 LVD controller configured for RAID level 5, meaning one of the three disks was used for redundancy.

The Enterprise NX-Q has 2+1 redundant, load-balancing, hot-swappable power supplies, and the system fans are also hot-swappable.

The case suffers from the same lack of serviceability and expandability as the Gateway and Micron products.

The server comes with Intel LANDesk Server Manager and Intel Server Control to let you monitor the case temperature, voltages, fan speeds, case intrusion, memory, power supplies, processors and SCSI buses. A watchdog timer initiates automatic server rebooting if the operating system locks up. An emergency management port allows out-of-band access to the server for maintenance purposes.

The Tangent, Micron and Gateway servers all lost points for manageability and serviceability because they lack a fault-tolerant remote access card for remote server management, something we've come to expect in enterprise servers. Integration of their management platforms with a number of popular management tools is also missing.

The Micron NetFRAME 6200 server placed last in overall and performance scores. It came in fourth in the file tests and last in the SQL and Web tests.

The NetFRAME 6200 motherboard has six PCI slots and one shared PCI and ISA slot. The case holds six 1-inch hot-swappable drives.

The motherboard has a built-in dual Ultra2 LVD controller and a single-channel UltraNarrow controller. The Mylex Accelerate250 three-channel Ultra2 LVD array controller makes use of the dual-channel Ultra2 LVD controller. The array controller was configured for RAID Level 5.

Our unit was shipped with three 9G-byte Ultra2 LVD drives. One of the drives in the array was used for redundancy. The unit has 2+1 redundant, load-balancing, hot-swappable power supplies, and the fans are hot-swappable as well.

The server comes with Intel LANDesk Server Manager and Intel Server Control to allow monitoring of case temperature, voltages, fan speeds, case intrusion, memory, power supplies, processors and SCSI buses. An emergency management port allows out-of-band access to the server for maintenance purposes.
RELATED LINKS NetResults
How we ranked the servers in several categories.

Detailed test results
Excel 5.0 spreadsheet comparing the servers in various tests.

Test methodology
How we tested the servers.

Our server testing is performed at North Carolina State University's Centennial Networking Labs (CNL) in Raleigh. CNL tests network equipment and network-attached devices for interoperability and performance.

Bass, a senior technical staff member at CNL, designs and leads the execution of the test suites. He can be reached at john_bass@ ncsu.edu. Anthony Grieco and Simon Booth assisted.