Compaq 6400R: Pint-Sized Powerhouse
May 3, 1999
By Dave Fetters
Compaq Computer Corp.'s new ProLiant 6400R will have you believing that good things come in small packages. It offers top-notch performance, reliability and manageability in a compact 4U chassis. You can easily fit 10 of these gems into a standard 42U rack, which makes the 6400R ideal for tight spaces, server farms or server clusters.
With support for up to four Quad Pentium III Xeons and 4 GB of RAM, the 6400R performs as well as any full-size rival. And with a starting price less than $7,500, the 6400R won't break any budgets. If your storage requirements don't exceed 72 GB or you don't mind adding out-of-the-box storage, the 6400R clearly warrants a closer look.
Compact Compaq One of Compaq's strengths is its chassis design, and the 6400R's makeup offers another reminder why. Like most of the vendor's servers, the 6400R's chassis is constructed of thick sheet metal with machined-aluminum grab rails on its face. New to ProLiant servers is the 6400's pair of front-mounted, hot-swappable power supplies, each adequate to run the server single-handedly. This is the first Compaq server with this particular design.
In addition, each of the power supplies features two LEDs indicating its presence and status. The character LED display panel has been replaced by a single yellow LED, identifying server power.
6400R maintenance is effortless; all access to the unit is convenient, whether it's at the front or the top. Both the power supplies and the drives are accessible from the front only, while internal access to the server's expansion cards goes through the top-mounted door. To gain access to the CPUs and memory, I simply removed the entire top by detaching two front-mounted screws.
Further improving upon earlier ProLiant server designs, Compaq includes updated front-mounted, hot-swappable, low-profile hard drives--the units measure just 1-inch high.
Also significant is the nonproprietary SCA drive interface, which provides both power and data signals to the drive via an 80-pin interface cable. Previously, Compaq used a daughterboard that piggybacked onto the drive and plugged into a proprietary drive slot.
Design enhancements aside, I had qualms about some of Compaq's hardware choices. Although arguably insignificant, the server's CD-ROM drive was a slim-line model similar to the type found in laptops. The flimsy, spring-loaded tray ejects abruptly, and was worrisome. Since the bootable SmartStart CD is required if any aspect of the system hardware configuration--including the array controller--changes, having a sturdy and functional CD-ROM drive can actually become important.
Phat Performance For a compact server of only 4U, the 6400R is big on performance. Our test unit featured Quad 500-MHz Pentium III Xeon processors, each of which includes 2 MB of L2 (Layer 2) cache. It was loaded with 512 MB ECC (Error-Correcting Code) RAM, with room to expand to 4 GB. During tests in our Real-World Labs® at the University of Wisconsin, the raw CPU performance, in terms of MIPS and MFLOPS, was approximately 20 percent better than a similarly equipped Dell PowerEdge 6300 with Quad 400-MHz Pentium II Xeons.
Compaq built the 6400R for speed. The server's motherboard features six hot-plug, 64-bit PCI slots, one of which is a shared PCI/ISA slot. Storage performance is complemented by the optional 64-bit Smart Array 3200 Controller. With its Dual Channel Wide-Ultra2 SCSI interface, data transfers can race to 160 MB per second. However, during testing our server sustained a more realistic and respectable 10 MB per second with its quad 4.3-GB, 10,000-rmp Seagate Cheetah drives.
Network performance also was noteworthy, thanks to Compaq's optional 64-bit NC3131 NIC. This adapter features dual 10/100 ports and a gigabit fiber port. To test gigabit interoperability, I ran fiber from the server to our Lucent Technologies Cajun P550 switch and experienced no anomalies.
6400R management is handled via Compaq's server management suite, Insight Manager 4.22. Hardware configurations are similarly handled by an updated revision of Compaq's SmartStart software.
Using Insight Manager, I was able to monitor and control our ProLiant 6500 and two 2500 servers via SNMP. The management software requires you to install the management client on remote machines for complete functionality. Like most other SNMP-based management packages, Insight Manager provided me with status and configuration details, and generated utilization and threshold alarms. Its interface exhibits an easy-to-use Windows-based console and includes a Web-based interface, so you can access device and configuration information.
Send your comments on this article to Dave Fetters at dfetters@nwc.com.
|
Here
Here
REPORTS
ANALYTICS
Follow 
