Management Software
Compaq ships the ProLiant 6000 with several systems management support
utilities, including Compaq Insight Manager, Compaq Integrated Management Log
Viewer, Compaq Array Configuration Utility, Compaq Power Down Manager, and
Compaq Power Supply Viewer. These systems management features let the ProLiant
6000 work with any enterprise systems management product.
Companies that make the effort to engineer their products for reliability
and easy detection of problems always impress me. For years, Compaq has been
going a step further, providing features that predict potential component
failures before problems occur. Compaq Insight Manager provides this
functionality by monitoring key aspects of component performance. For example,
the software monitors the length of time hard disks take to spin up. When
spin-up time starts to take longer than usual, Compaq Insight Manager alerts
users that the drive might be failing. Compaq supports the ProLiant 6000 with a
3-year onsite warranty, which includes prefailure replacement of processors,
memory, and hard disks when Insight Manager reports a degraded component.
Compaq Integrated Management Log Viewer displays the system-level hardware
event log that the ProLiant 6000 maintains. Compaq Array Configuration Utility
displays configuration information about the Smart Array 3100ES Controller and
lets you configure the controller. The utility is also a convenient tool for
displaying information about your SCSI devices and device IDs.
Compaq Power Down Manager lets you disable the ProLiant 6000's external
power switch or set the external power switch to shut down NT before powering
down the system. Compaq Power Supply Viewer saves you from wondering whether
your redundant power supplies are truly redundant. The utility displays power
consumption as a percentage of available power, and it lets you know whether the
server would survive a failure of one of your power supplies. Compaq Power
Supply Viewer also displays AC line and DC output voltage levels.
How Does It Perform?
Because server vendors are increasingly standardizing computers' components,
you can often attribute performance differences between systems that contain the
same class of processor to I/O subsystem performance. When I ran the Windows
NT Magazine Lab's usual file-server benchmark tests on the ProLiant 6000, I
didn't expect results dramatically different from my recent benchmarks of HP's
NetServer LH 3, a dual-450MHz Pentium II (Deschutes Slot 1) system. (For more
information about the system, see "NetServer LH 3," December 1998.)
The LH 3 has five disk spindles on a caching controller, and the ProLiant 6000
has only three disk spindles in its RAID 0 data array. Nevertheless, the
ProLiant 6000 performed much better than the LH 3. I ran Bluecurve's Dynameasure
Copy All Bi-directional tests with a Special File workload and a 24MB test data
set to measure both systems' performance. The ProLiant 6000 peaked at
17,097KBps, almost 50 percent more throughput than the dual-processor system
produced.
During the peak period of the ProLiant 6000 benchmark test in which I
recorded 17,097KBps of throughput, the four processors' average CPU utilization
was 58 percent, 53 percent, 47 percent, and 20 percent, for an average
utilization of 45 percent. Because of these processor loads, I figured that
removing one or two processors from the ProLiant 6000 would affect performance
only minimally. To test my theory, I rebooted the server in a two-processor
configuration, then ran the Dynameasure benchmark again. The ProLiant 6000's
peak throughput dropped by only 8.6 percent--throughput reached
15,629KBps, with an average CPU utilization of 66 percent. This test led me to
the conclusion that the file-server application that the Dynameasure test
simulates doesn't benefit much from a four-processor ProLiant 6000 unless you
increase the disk subsystem's throughput capacity.
You'd probably like a performance improvement of more than 10 percent for
an investment in 100 percent more processors. However, if you invest in a
quad-Xeon system to run only a file-server application, you'll probably also
invest in an I/O subsystem that better matches throughput capacity to the
system's CPU capacity. Alternatively, you might invest in a quad-Xeon system to
run back-office applications that are more CPU intensive than file-server
applications and benefit more from the ProLiant 6000's four processors.
Is It for You?
The quad-Xeon ProLiant 6000 is a solid server with substantial expansion
capacity. The system might work very well for a small business. The business
could start with Model 1-128, a single-processor unit with a modest 128MB of RAM
and standard SCSI controllers. Then, if the company needed more power, the
ProLiant 6000 could grow to hold four Xeon processors, 8GB of RAM, and three
SCSI channels or a fibre channel to support its RAID arrays.