NetFRAME Server Enforces Church And State

By Stephen J. Rieks  Atall, black monolith, looking li ke something out of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, NetFRAME NF9008XP is Micron Electron-ic's latest Intel-based server. But instead of eerie music emanating from the device, it delivers high-end performance, ideal for mission-critical enterprise computing. I tested a beta version of the NF9008XP at Network Computing's Syracuse University lab. It provides SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) capabilities with the latest in system design. Micron has successfully combined its 9000 series servers with Intel's latest 200-MHz Pentium Pro processors and a fast SCA2 disk subsystem. The system was configured with quad Pentium Pros, 256 MB of RAM, five 4.3-GB Western Digital SCSI-III hard drives, two QLOGIC SCSI controllers, three Intel 10/100 PCI network cards, a Sony SDX-300C 25/50-GB tape drive, a Toshiba SCSI CD-ROM and three hot-swappable power supplies--all for slightly more than $32,000. The NF9008XP's base price is $12,595 for the single-processor model. The NF9008XP is highly expandable with 16 DIMM (Dual Inline Memory Module) sockets; it supports a total of 2 GB of RAM (4 GB with 256-MB DIMMs). Eight internal hard drive bays and a maximum of three power supplies also provide room to grow. Micron designed the NF9008XP with faster processors in mind, making it easy to upgrade with the Pentium Pro line. Fancy Plumbing Trizone cooling, intelligent ductwork and 11--yes, 11--cooling fans enable each of the major subsystems on the NF9008XP to operate in its own temperature window. The bus configuration is even more impressive. Micron uses a proprietary "hot swap/add triple-peer" PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) architecture. With it, PCI cards can be deactivated, replaced and reactivated from the system while the system remains powered on and functioning. In the lab, I successfully deactivated, replaced and reactivated one of the Intel 82557 10/100-Mbps network cards while a client was utilizing the server. This novel PCI architecture separates network card I/O, disk I/O and stand ard system I/O (which includes video and integrated SCSI) onto three separate PCI buses. This separation of power allows for better performance. Also, the architecture minimizes the likelihood of a failing component locking up the entire system. In total, the system has eight PCI slots, but no ISA or EISA slots. Music, Maestro! The NF9008XP's hot-swap and hot-add features are controlled by the proprietary Maestro management software package. The server portion of this package can run under Windows NT or IntranetWare. Maestro independently manages every PCI slot in the system and monitors other hardware aspects of the server, including temperature, air flow, power, memory and CPU functionality. In the lab, I tested this functionality by removing one of the hot-swappable power supplies. Within two seconds of pulling the supply, Maestro sent an error message. After clearing it, I reinserted the power supply and received that same notification. To test Maestro further, I removed the power from one o f the CPU cooling fans and received an error that "the speed of the system boards cooling fan has dropped below its minimum limit." The server's ability to detect these simulated failures was quite impressive. Stephen J. Rieks is a systems programmer at Syracuse University. He can be reached at sjrieks@cs.syr.edu.

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