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Small Server Bonanza
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August 7, 2003
By Steven Schuchart Jr.
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Chips Matter
The system's chipset largely decides the features of a given motherboard. We saw two chipsets in this review: the Intel 845E and the ServerWorks Grand Champion SL.
The Grand Champion SL's features make it superior to the Intel 845E. The 64-bit, 33-MHz bus on the Grand Champion SL gets a theoretical bandwidth of 254 MB per second, not counting command overhead and wait states, while the 32-bit, 33-MHz bus on the Intel 845 gets only a theoretical 127.2 MB per second, again not counting command overhead and wait states.
You should take into account other hardware considerations, such as environmental control systems, beyond chipset and motherboard features. A system must be engineered to compensate for being jammed into a small, hot closet, lest it should suffer premature hardware failure. That means making sure there's enough venting in the case, and enough fans on critical components.
Let's talk about the fans. Believe it or not, there are features that extend the life of this equipment. Ball-bearing fans, at a minimum, are essential. Many "bargain" servers use cheap sleeve-bearing fans, which have a much shorter MTBF (mean time between failures), especially in environments with a lot of dust. Since you probably won't find dustless servers aside from those that have come fresh from the factory, we were pleased that all the systems we received contained ball-bearing fans.
SCSI vs. ATA
For pure performance, SCSI is still king. However, SCSI is also expensive up front and on a per-gigabyte basis. For machines in the sub-$1,000 price class, we recommend ATA (IDE)-based hard-disk subsystems--the price per gigabyte and lack of up-front costs make ATA the best deal. Go SCSI only if you need the performance premium it offers.
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Another interesting thing we learned during our hard-disk testing is that some manufacturers (IBM and HP among the vendors in our review) turn off write caching on their server-class hardware, even on ATA systems. When you're looking at the write performance of these servers, this may seem like a huge disadvantage--but the truth is that it makes good sense. If you lose power during a cached writing operation, you will lose not only that data, but possibly all the data on a given disk. Though data loss is possible with or without write cache enabled, the chances of disaster increase enormously with write caching on because the "crash death" window is much bigger. This risk can be mitigated by a UPS, but we find the approach sensible even in light of the performance penalty. Designing on the side of caution is wise in the server space.
We liked all the machines we received for this review, and a couple are fantastic deals to boot. Take the Dell 600SC and the Gateway 920: Both were able performers and included small tape drives, anticipating a future need and still staying within our price, Gateway by more than $100. We wouldn't hesitate to recommend either one.
The HP tc2120 is a strong contender, sporting a SCSI drive system. The IBM eServer xSeries and Lantech Database 2700 use an older motherboard chipset, meaning they have only 32-bit, 33-MHz buses, making them less competitive in the long run. At the end of the day, an on-board RAID card, a Xeon processor and the ability to add a second Xeon made HP's ProLiant ML330 the winner of this review.
At first blush, our performance charts may not seem to support this pick: The ML330 had the worst write-test numbers while maintaining the highest CPU utilization. Although it fared better in the read test, it still had the highest utilization. And it didn't distinguish itself in either the "Maximum I/O Rate Test" (or the "NWC Generalized Custom Test".
The reality is that the ML330 struggles in write tests because the write caching is turned off and it has IDE disks. Reactivate write caching on the ATA RAID controller, as we did during testing, and it beats most of the machines in the test. Performance is also related to the processor, and the Xeon will outperform all the Pentium 4s in the other machines. Processor selection and expandability were key criteria, outweighing performance.
All prices are as configured for this test; in many cases you can acquire the units for less money sans some bells and whistles.
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