To sweeten the deal, HP is offering the LH 6000 at a great value. Our fully loaded server with six 550-MHz Pentium III Xeon processors and 2 MB of cache, 4 GB of RAM and 10 9.1-GB Ultra160 drives came in at just under $30,000, which is what you'd pay for a comparable four-way server with fewer features.

New and Improved

Recently, HP revamped its server naming scheme. The LH4 has been revised and rebadged the LH 4000 to go along with the release of the LH 6000 and the LXr 8000. From the exterior, the LH 6000 looks identical to the LH4 I tested; it should, because HP confirmed that it uses the same chassis--and that's a good thing. Featuring the same lockable and detachable front bezel, along with convenient finger screws throughout, field-dressing this chassis is a snap. Additionally, with the included hardware, the server can be flipped on its side and rack mounted--taking up 8U.

After I popped the case open, it was apparent that the chassis is the only thing the LH4 and LH 6000 have in common. Sporting a new design, the LH 6000 offers a number of performance upgrades. One of the most notable differences is the motherboard chipset. Like Dell Computer Corp., HP has turned to the newer ServerWorks chipsets, instead of the Intel chipsets found in previous models. The LH 6000 uses the ServerSet III HE chipset. This chip upgrade gives the LH 6000 a tremendous amount of flexibility and performance. The most obvious benefit is the support for two additional processors. Unlike the Intel Profusion chipset, which uses two banks of four processors tied together with a pair of cache coherency filters, the HE chipsets support all six processors on a single bus, eliminating any performance and scalability issues associated with the coherency filters.

Using this new chipset, HP has made a number of enhancements over the older LH4. Like Dell, HP has wisely decided to go with a peering bus architecture. Using three independent buses, the LH 6000 includes eight 64-bit PCI slots, of which two are 66 MHz. This is a far cry from the LH4, which included only a pair of 33-MHz 64-bit slots and a single interconnected dual bus. In an environment with moderate-to-heavy I/O loads, such as the Dynameasure Exchange workload I ran during my lab tests, the LH 6000 has no problem keeping up the pace.

During my previous testing of four-way servers, the performance issues the LH4 faced were largely because of the weak-performing embedded RAID controller. In the LH 6000, HP has taken care of this bottleneck by redesigning the embedded RAID controller using Intel's i960 VH I/O processor in conjunction with 32 MB to 128 MB of write-back cache (the LH4 had a maximum 16 MB of cache). My performance testing with Dynameasure supported the validity of these enhancements: The LH 6000 didn't have any problem outperforming the Compaq Computer Corp. ProLiant 5500. Another notable aspect of the LH 6000 is the support for up to 8 GB of RAM. With the addition of the 4 GB of extra RAM, memory-chewing applications such as thin-client computing--Microsoft's Terminal server comes to mind--become a more viable solution.

In the makeover, the availability features in the LH 6000 have not been compromised. With 12 hot-swappable Ultra160 drive bays on the front, four hot-plug PCI slots, three 600-watt hot-swappable power supplies and a trio of 10/100 teaming NICs, the LH 6000 was well up to code for enterprise and data-center applications.

Management 101

The relatively unchanged set of software tools, including the familiar HP TopTools suite, handles server management. TopTools is a tabular Web-based application that makes it possible to monitor, administer and configure NetServers. TopTools requires that the NetServer Agent software, which is basically an SNMP- and DMI (Desktop Management Interface) 2.0-compliant agent, be installed on the participating servers. It includes a discovery feature that made identifying HP devices on our network an easy task. Because TopTools uses standard DMI and SNMP connections, I was able to monitor non-HP devices that had SNMP or DMI agents already installed. This is a real plus in smaller network environments that don't already have management tools in place. Once I installed TopTools, I was able to configure alerts and the correlating actions, such as paging or mail notification.

Ultracompact Version

HP is launching another NetServer in conjunction with the LH 6000 release, the LT 6000r (price starts at $8,199). Based on the LH 6000, the LT 6000r is a six-way server packaged in an ultracompact 4U form factor. With confirmed support for the upcoming Cascade Communications' Xeon processor, the LT 6000r should make a real splash in tight-quartered data centers. Now, using all my fingers and toes to do the calculations, based on 800-MHz Cascade processors, this would equate to a staggering 86,400 MHz of processing power in a single 72U cabinet occupying less than three square feet of floor space.

Send your comments on this article to Dave Fetters at dfetters@nwc.com.