The NEC Express5800/R320 is a fault-tolerant server that’s ideally suited to mission-critical virtualization, database, and email tasks—all the vital services that your organization depends on. I reviewed a NEC Express5800/R320 4U rack-mounted server with two CPU modules that are kept in lockstep. The CPU modules aren’t simply individual processors. Instead, each CPU module is a completely enclosed 2U unit; each module contains its own six-core Intel Xeon CPU, motherboard, RAM, power supply, and hard drives. Each CPU module slides into a chassis that you mount in your rack. Figure 1 shows the NEC Express5800/R320.
The NEC 5800’s mission-critical design was apparent immediately, beginning with my out-of-the-box experience. Unlike most servers that are shipped in a standard corrugated box, the NEC 5800 comes on a wooden pallet. After opening the box I was a bit surprised to see that the unit required some assembly. My NEC contact told me that the company ships the unit with each CPU module packaged separately to improve shipping reliability. Each CPU module is housed in a steel case. The chassis is also extremely rugged and made out of steel. As you might guess, this solid construction makes for a pretty heavy unit. The NEC 5800 weighs in at just about 105 pounds.
To install the unit I basically slid each of the CPU modules into the chassis and fastened them in place using the thumbscrew latch assembly provided on the front of each CPU module. I then mounted the unit in the rack and connected it to the power and network. Each CPU module has its own power supply. The NEC 5800 unit that I tested came equipped with one logical Xeon 5670 processor—a six-core CPU running at 2.93GHz, with the new Intel 5500 chipset. My test unit had 4GB of RAM and 144GB of disk storage with a 73GB, 2.5", 15K rpm hard disk drive.
Just to be clear, I use the term logical because the unit actually had two physical sets of CPU, motherboard, RAM, and disk storage—one set per CPU module. This redundant hardware is what enables the fault tolerance. Each CPU module can support up to 96GB of RAM running at 1333MHz, as well as up to 4.8TB of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) disk storage.
Internally, there were two PCI Express 2.0 expansion slots and two PCI Express 1.0 expansion slots. On the back of each CPU module there were three 1GB network ports. Two ports were intended for client networking activity, whereas the other port was intended for remote management. In total there were four client network ports that were configured as a team using Intel’s Advanced Network Services (ANS) technology. The teaming technology provided fault tolerance for networking connectivity to the unit.
Notably, the CPU modules themselves don’t provide connections for a video display, keyboard, or mouse. Instead, the video, keyboard, and mouse connections were on the chassis—not on each CPU module. The integrated video controller provided 32MB of RAM and supported a maximum of 1280 x 1024 display resolution. Like several of the newer servers I’ve tested, the NEC 5800 had no PS/2-style mouse and keyboard ports; the mouse and keyboard connections were USB only. You could use the port on the front of the unit or the ports on the back of the unit. Because two of these ports are required by the mouse and keyboard, I did wish that the unit had more USB ports available—especially on the front of the system. The front of the chassis provided a vertically mounted DVD drive and the single USB port. On the back the chassis had the two additional USB ports, as well as the monitor port and two serial ports.
The power switch is protected by a hard plastic flip cover designed to prevent accidently powering the unit on or off. When the unit is powered on it takes a couple of minutes before it displays the BIOS setup prompt, then it continues its boot process like any standard server. After I initially powered the unit on, it went through a period of about a half hour while it synced the storage. A Ready to Pull light indicates when the unit is operating in fault-tolerant mode. At first the unit wouldn’t go into fault-tolerant mode. However, after I reconfigured the network teaming, the Ready to Pull light came on and the unit was fully fault tolerant.