Made Over From the Inside Out

On the outside, Compaq has given the ML530 a new look and a slightly reorganized chassis. Gone is the LCD display panel that gave system diagnostic information. In its place is a front-panel diagnostic lighting unit that indicates general server health. Inside the chassis, Compaq has placed strategic diagnostic LEDs, following IBM's Light Path technology, which instantly lets you pinpoint a failed system resource by visual inspection. The chassis has enough room for two wide Ultra2/Ultra3 SCSI disk bays; each bay holds up to six Ultra3 (160 MB per second) hard disk drives, for a total of 218 GB of internal online storage.

The guts of the Compaq ML530 have been totally revamped. Compaq has moved all motherboard electronics onto a removable electronics tray, allowing you to service or upgrade the ML530 by simply snapping out the existing motherboard, sliding in a new unit, and transferring the memory and processor modules. The motherboard of the ML530 is nothing short of phenomenal. It's built around the industry's latest 133-MHz system specification. The processors and internal memory bus all run at 133 MHz, compared with the previous generation's 66-MHz and 100-MHz bus speeds.

Industry benchmarks, such as SPECbench, have shown that a 33 percent improvement in bus speed correlates directly to a 3 percent to 10 percent boost in performance, based on the application's dependency on memory I/O speeds. The ProLiant ML530 supports up to 4 GB of 133-MHz ECC (error-correcting code) SDRAM.

The motherboard shipping with the ML530 has support for two Intel Corp. Pentium III Xeon processors at 800 MHz. These processors are the first generation of Intel's new 0.18 micron Coppermine Xeon. Unlike previous-generation Xeons, these processors run at a 133-MHz bus speed and have on-chip voltage regulation. The on-chip voltage regulator simplifies motherboard design and reduces the chance of a motherboard failure because of component malfunction. It also means you can easily add a second processor without worrying about strange terminators or other odd accessories that must be plugged into your motherboard. Also new to the Coppermine architecture is full-speed on-chip cache. Unlike previous chips, where the cache operated at only half the speed of the microprocessor, the new Xeon 800 cache operates at full processor clock speed, which further enhances the performance of the chip. The Coppermine Xeon 800 is initially available with only a 256-KB on-chip cache, but future versions will be available in 512-KB, 1-MB and 2-MB versions.

The system I tested came configured with 640 MB of memory, a Compaq Smart Array 431 Ultra-3/160m SCSI RAID controller, six 10,000-rpm Quantum Ultra3 disks and a pair of NC3132/6132 Gigabit Ethernet network interfaces. The ML530's expansion options include eight hot-pluggable PCI slots. I installed Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 using Compaq's SmartStart server setup utility. Compaq has made great strides in simplifying server setup thanks to this bootable CD utility. The server was up and running in less than an hour, and I proceeded to benchmark its disk- and network-performance characteristics.

Built for Speed

The benchmarks revealed that this server can really hum. I began by benchmarking the network performance of the 64-bit, 33-MHz NC6132 Gigabit Ethernet card. The ML530 was capable of cranking out 521 Mbps of cached data to 12 Pentium III clients, as measured by Ganymede's Chariot 3.1 software. In individual read/write tests, the server's best data-receive rate was 398 Mbps, and its aggregate bidirectional throughput when transmitting and receiving was 662.5 Mbps.

I also tested the NC6132's fault-tolerance features. Compaq lets you team multiple NICs for added bandwidth or for fault tolerance. Three different modes of teaming are available, all of which are fault tolerant: no load-balancing, standard load-balancing (downstream bandwidth optimized) and Cisco Etherchannel load-balancing. I chose to test the fault-tolerant mode without any load-balancing features turned on.

In the lab, I discovered that disconnecting one of the two links from our Cisco 2948G-L3 switch caused the server to fail over properly in 30 to 40 seconds. Reconnecting the primary link does not cause it to return to the primary fiber (this is a selectable option, however); detaching the secondary link caused the traffic to properly fail over to the primary link within 30 to 40 seconds.

I also tested the raw disk performance of the ML530 server platform. And as a baseline for comparison, I tested a Dell Computer Corp. PowerEdge 2400/600 server, a single CPU 600-MHz (133-MHz bus) system with 512 MB of RAM and a PERC2 Ultra2 RAID controller and two Ultra2 SCSI disks. The disks on both systems were configured for RAID 0 operation. Both systems were running Windows NT Server 4.0 with service pack release 5 installed.

I used Intel's Iometer product to benchmark both systems and read performance in two fashions: linear data transfers (for high-bandwidth applications) and sequential data queries (similar to walking a database looking for information).

As the results show, the ML530 handily beat our baseline server in terms of raw disk speed and overall I/Os per second. These massive gains in performance are tied directly to the new ML530 architecture and the Ultra3 SCSI subsystem.

Send your comments on this article to Joel Conover at jconover@nwc.com.