To provide some relief, administrators are implementing high-density, rack-mount systems. About a year ago, Compaq Computer Corp. began shipping the ProLiant 850R, its first low-profile, rack-mount server, but it was not well-designed for a rack system. The 850R lacked many of the features--such as sliding rails--that good rack-mount servers provide.

Now, Compaq makes up for past mistakes with its ProLiant 1850R, which includes many of the features--such as rails and front-mounted status LEDs--missing from the 850R, while adding performance, scalability and increased fault tolerance. I tested a preproduction 1850R unit at our Northern California corporate lab, which has installed numerous 850Rs. During testing, we successfully installed both Novell IntranetWare and Microsoft NT Server 4.0, along with Microsoft's BackOffice suite.

The server's base price, $3,906, includes a single 400-MHz CPU and 128-MB ECC RAM. Our fully loaded unit (256 MB of RAM, three 10,000 RPM drives, one newly released Smart Array 3200ES controller and a single power supply) costs slightly more than $10,000. If you don't need the fault-tolerance features, the 1850R's compact design or the management capabilities of the bundled Insight Manager software, you're better off purchasing a clone PC. Otherwise, the Compaq ProLiant 1850R is an excellent value and will be a key component in any system administrator's network. The 1850R is also Microsoft Cluster-certified and on the Microsoft Hardware Certification list.

SmartStart To assist in the ProLiant 1850R's installation and configuration, Compaq offers its SmartStart utility. During testing, it not only let us easily configure and install our copies of NT 4.0 and IntranetWare, but helped us configure the array controller. In addition, SmartStart created the Compaq system partition and copied the appropriate utilities to the system partition. All of these tasks can be accomplished manually, but SmartStart does it with less hassle and our server was up and running faster as a result.

One of the most significant limitations of the 850R was that it was difficult to remove from the rack system--a real problem if you need to work on it. Some of Compaq's other servers, such as the ProLiant 6500, let you extract the server, which is attached to rails, from the rack. The 1850R has rail attachments, so you can easily remove the top cover and work on the server without completely removing it from the rack. And since the 1850R is specifically designed for a rack enclosure, you don't have to worry about air-flow issues--you can stack multiple 1850Rs without risk of overheating. I had no problems installing the 1850R into a 42 U APC NetShelter rack cabinet in our lab.

Even as a low-profile server, the 1850R supports up to three 1-inch hot-pluggable drives. The test unit shipped with three 9-GB Seagate Cheetah 10,000 RPM LVD Ultra SCSI disk drives, which were attached to Compaq's latest Smart Array 3200ES disk controller (a separate purchase). With these three hot-pluggable drives, I configured the array in a RAID 5 setting. I then removed one of the drives, and the system continued running. I really liked the internal hot-swap drives, which provide a high level of fault tolerance without the added expense of a $1,000 external disk array enclosure. And with the Smart Array 3200ES's two external SCSI ports, you can attach additional drives for greater capacity and fault tolerance.