The 1850R comes standard with an integrated dual-channel Wide-Ultra SCSI 3 controller, so you're covered if you're not planning to buy a RAID array controller. I used this controller to connect a variety of devices--a DLT tape unit, a CD-ROM tower and several external SCSI drives--without a hitch. In addition to the three hot-swappable drive bays, the 18050R ships with two 5.25-inch, full-height bays, which let you install additional hard drives or other devices, such as CD-ROM or tape drives. I appreciated having this added capacity in such a small form.

The 1850R is no slouch in performance, either. The server is based on the Intel 440BX chipset and 100-MHz GTL bus architecture, which enables a 100-MHz path to main memory from the CPU, an improvement from the earlier 66-MHz bus speed. If you need additional memory for large applications, the 1850R supports up to 1 GB of RAM.

The 1850R performed very well on CPU-intensive tests in our benchmarks using the Neal Nelson Associates' Business Benchmark 2.4. In the disk I/O tests, the 1850R performed especially well in the write-intensive areas, posting the best scores over a 12-disk, eight-way Pentium Pro server. This performance can be attributed to the Smart Array 3200 controller's configuration, as we placed a higher priority on write tasks. In addition, the controller's 64 MB of RAM let us cache many of the write tasks. Because of our emphasis on write activities, read activities suffered. You can configure the Smart Array 3200 controller to place a greater emphasis on read or write operations.

Foolproof Fault Tolerance On top of its impressive performance capabilities, the 1850R features some fault-tolerance capabilities often found on high-end servers. The server can be equipped with dual load-sharing power supplies. If one power supply fails, you can remove it while the server remains fully intact. The 1850R also includes the standard ProLiant Automatic Server Recovery (ASR-2) configuration. If the system freezes, ASR-2 will boot the server to the OS or onboard diagnostic utilities.

In addition, the 1850R supports the Compaq Insight Manager agents, which let you remotely manage the server's performance and status, including temperature, SCSI bus errors and driver array status. The Integrated Remote Console (IRC) lets you dial into the server and perform configuration functions. You can check the server status logs or watch the server POST (Power-On Self Test) process. The IRC does not support GUI OSes, so you can't control NT remotely. However, you can execute server diagnostics, such as the system configuration utility. In the lab, the ability to watch the POST process remotely let me diagnose problems without having to be in front of the server.

In addition to the integrated SCSI controller, the 1850R also ships standard with a 1-MB SVGA video adapter (up to 1,152 x 864 noninterlaced resolution at 256 colors), a Compaq Netelligent 10/100 network adapter and four PCI slots (one slot is PCI/ISA). I painlessly installed and tested our server with a variety of PCI adapters.

While it's generous to provide four expansion slots, I didn't like their placement. The slots face the unit's right side; I would have preferred that they faced the top, as on the ProLiant 6500 server, which facilitates removal and insertion.

Besides paying attention to the server's internal system design, the engineers at Compaq have also added some minor--but very useful--features on the outside of the unit. The 1850R includes three LEDs on the front of the server. The top LED indicates disk activity, the second displays the LINK status of the integrated Ethernet adapter and the third LED shows the activity of the Ethernet controller.

I regretted the absence of the front-panel LCD screen that's part of Compaq's 6500/7000 server family. This screen is very useful for placing the name of the server or the IP address. If your network includes multiple servers in a rack, it helps to be able to distinguish servers easily.

More to my liking was the ability to store the system configuration utilities and diagnostic programs on a special 30-MB partition. When the server boots up, you simply press a function key to enter these programs. This partition eliminates the need to locate the right disks or CD-ROM. The 1850R also includes a year 2000-compliant BIOS.

Jay Milne is an independent network consultant. Send comments on this article to him at jmilne@nwc.com.