Serious scalability in a quad-Xeon server
I recently tested Compaq's ProLiant 6000 with the Pentium II Xeon Processor,
the server that marks Compaq's entry into the quad-Xeon market. The system I
reviewed includes four 400MHz Pentium II Xeon (Deschutes Slot 2 architecture)
processors.
When I received the ProLiant 6000, the first thing I wanted to do was see
the Xeon processor. To satisfy my curiosity, I removed one of the system's
chips. It slid out easily and was soon in my hands.
The first time I saw a Pentium II, processors stopped looking like chips to
me and started looking like field replaceable units (FRUs in IBM terminology)
from mainframe-class systems. I've spent my share of time in shops with
liquid-cooled mainframes, but I never thought I'd see a liquid-cooled PC
processor. Compaq ships each Pentium II Xeon processor with what looks like a
small radiator, a mechanism that transfers heat away from the chip's primary
heat sink. Compaq calls this device the evaporator plate and water-cooled
heat pipe. The mechanism lends a lower profile to the system board than the
standard heat sink.
Replacing the ProLiant 6000's processor was easy. Compaq's
processor-insertion guides make the process almost foolproof.
System Hardware
A ProLiant 6000 with four Pentium II Xeon processors supplies a fair amount
of processing power, and the system has the I/O capacity and expansion
capabilities to help you harness the processors' power. The ProLiant 6000's
standard configuration includes one hot-swappable hard disk cage, but you can
add two more cages. Each of the machine's cages can hold up to six 1" hard
disks or up to four 1.6" hard disks. These numbers mean that if you
configure the system with three cages and fill each cage with 9GB hard disks,
you can store 162GB of data in a unit the size of a two-drawer filing cabinet. A
couple years ago, I would have wondered what kind of network would ever need
that much storage, but if you use online analytical processing (OLAP)
databases and support users who rarely delete files, you'll appreciate the
option to expand to 162GB. In addition to the hot-swappable hard disk cages, the
system has six half-height 5.25" drive bays. One bay holds a 5.25"
disk drive, one holds the system's CD-ROM drive, and four are empty.
The ProLiant 6000 has three Ultra Wide SCSI-3 buses that support data rates
up to 40MBps. The system I tested includes Compaq's Smart Array 3100ES
Controller, a 64-bit PCI card that has extended SCSI connectors that connect to
each of the hot-swappable hard disk cages. With these connectors, the system
doesn't require SCSI cables to the array controller. This feature makes for a
clean installation and eliminates the need to remove cables when you remove the
array controller. The ProLiant 6000 has 56MB of onboard, battery-backed,
read-write cache that enhances the disk array's performance. The array supports
RAID 0 (data striping with no fault tolerance), RAID 1 (mirroring), RAID 0+1 (a
mirrored RAID 0 stripe set), RAID 4 (fault tolerance with a dedicated parity
drive), and RAID 5 (fault tolerance with parity information spread across all
drives). (For more information about RAID, see Joel Sloss, "RAID: Enhanced
Disk Storage for Windows NT," August 1997.)
Three PCI buses with a total of ten I/O expansion slots give the ProLiant
6000 plenty of expansion capacity. Bus 1 and bus 2 each hold two 32-bit slots.
Bus 3 holds five 64-bit slots, two of which include the extended SCSI
connectors. Compaq designed the system's one ISA slot to hold a modem board. The
system has a standard set of I/O interfaces. The integrated PCI video controller
comes standard with 2MB of memory and supports resolutions up to 1024 * 768
pixels. The standard configuration also includes two serial ports and a parallel
port. The keyboard and mouse ports use small PS/2 connectors.
The system supports Error-Correcting Code (ECC) RAM. It uses 60 nanosecond
(ns) Enhanced Data Output (EDO) DIMMs up to 256MB each. Eight banks of four
DIMMs in matched sets support a total of up to 8GB of memory.
Compaq supplies a Netelligent Dual 10/100 TX PCI UTP Ethernet controller
and Compaq Advanced Network Control Utility software. You use the software to
configure the Netelligent Ethernet cards; when you use it with a pair of
dual-port or single-port Ethernet cards, the utility lets you set up
fault-tolerant network connections. The ProLiant 6000 also comes with
fault-tolerant power configurations. You can configure the server with as many
as three load-balancing, hot-pluggable, redundant power supplies. Depending on
your system configuration's power load, you might require two power supplies for
system operation and a third power supply for fail-safe redundancy.