Dual-core speed for the SMB set

Reviewing SMB-oriented products is a natural for me because I run a small business of my own. The only problem? If a product is any good, my employees tend to latch on to it, and then I face the inevitable tears and tantrums when the product has to go back to the vendor. Such is the case with the three SMB dual-core servers I’ve had running in a real-life environment since October.

Dell and Gateway shipped Intel dual-core CPU-based products for this review: Dell sent its new PowerEdge 830 and 850 machines, while Gateway sent its E-9220T. All are value-server platforms aimed at SMBs or, in the case of the PowerEdge 850, SMBs and high-volume rack centers. All ran varying forms of Intel dual-core CPUs and some flavor of the Windows Server OS.

Judging from my test results — and my employees’ reactions — the Dell machines have a slight edge with faster performance and some solid management tools. The Gateway E-9220T is no slouch, though, and it’s clearly designed to handle a normal SMB environment.

Dell PowerEdge 830 and 850

The PowerEdge 850 arrived first, and my employees quickly fell in love with it. This is barely a 1U machine, yet it has all the niceties you’ve come to expect from Dell rack boxes, including both front- and rear-mounted KVM controls, universal 19-inch rack compatibility, recessed power switch, front-mounted DVD drive, and a massive — and loud — interior fan.

It’s this last feature that may keep the 850 out of an SMB office, as the noise level really is designed for a dedicated server closet or datacenter. This didn’t bother us, though; within seconds of cracking the packing tape, the 850 was ensconced in our APC half-size NetShelter.

The PowerEdge 830 is definitely the more SOHO-oriented machine. It’s a full tower case with little to differentiate it from a power workstation machine, save the tell-tale whooshing of serious fan power — but only when the system boots. After that, it settles down to a nice, small-office-friendly hum.

Both Dell machines shipped with an Intel Pentium D 840 dual-core CPU running at 3.2GHz with a 2MB onboard cache. Both also had 1GB of RAM installed for testing, although the 830 can handle 4GB, and the 850 can handle 8GB.

This difference, and the fact that the 850 is deliberately anemic on disk space (the 830 had three 150GB Maxtor UltraSCSI disks in a RAID 5 array, whereas the 850 arrived with a 80GB hard disk and has room for only one more), illustrates the 850’s real identity. This rack-mounted mini does double duty as an entry-level 1U component to grid or cluster computing installations. Further contributing to that view, both the 830 and the 850 are Linux-certified.

The two machines ship with Dell’s newest version of OpenManage Server Administrator, Version 4.3. Server Administrator still revolves around server-specific Web-based monitoring, but it also plugs in to the much richer OpenManage management framework — the full suite, however, is not available for free with every server purchase such as Server Administrator.

Most SMBs, however, will be plenty happy with Server Administrator — it may be a freebie, but there’s still meat on its bones. Diagnostics are surprisingly detailed, and it took me through a RAID setup — or rather, re-setup — from a dedicated user interface. You can even use the OpenManage setup disk as an emergency boot disk of sorts, as it will boot into Linux if left in the drive during a restart.

SMBs need these kinds of server management features as much as an enterprise: Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean your servers don’t crash. In fact, it’s worse for you if your server crashes because you probably only have the one, not racks and racks of spares like an enterprise does.

Having a bundled management tool is a critical part of an SMB-oriented server product, and it marks a big difference between the Dell and Gateway servers: Where Dell’s management covers the bases, Gateway’s is bare-bones. Gateway assumes a company will have its own server management product — which is an enterprise assumption, not an SMB assumption.

For SMBs that have server rooms and an eye toward higher-performance serving applications, the 850 can start out as an entry-level, all-purpose 1U and quickly be configured to fit into bleeding-edge clustering environments. But for real day-to-day, out-of-the-datacenter SMB file serving, the 830 is your best bet.

That said, one thing our 850 had that the 830 didn’t was Dell’s Remote Access card. This add-on comes standard with the advanced version of the 850 and allows almost total server management control via remote access. The board communicates with the 850’s onboard management controller to not only send back physical health alerts but also to supply a remote engineer with a variety of diagnostic tools like SSH and Telnet access, SNMP support, Virtual Media support, and an internal remote console if, all else fails. This is certainly a more datacenter-oriented feature than most SOHO operations would require, so its omission from the 830 is to be expected.

Gateway E-9220T

The E-9220T is Gateway’s stab at the SMB space, and it hits its mark squarely, although with both pros and cons as compared with Dell’s PowerEdge 830, the model that best matches up with truly SMB-focused E-9220T.

The E-9220T shares more with the PowerEdge 830 than just an awkward name: Both machines are tower-case models, intended for in-office use rather than a datacenter rack domicile such as the PowerEdge 850. But whereas the 830 looks and acts similar to any tower workstation, Gateway adds a number of hardware features that set the E-9220T apart from the workstation set before you even touch the console.

For one, it supports redundant and hot-swappable 500-watt power supplies. For another, Gateway outfitted our E-9220T with an optional dual-port 10/100/1000 server NIC card from Broadcom; Dell’s 830 comes with only one 400-watt power supply and a single, integrated 10/100/1000 port. For most SMB duties, you don’t need much more than the single port, but Gateway’s dual-port option allows not only for multiple network paths but also for port redundancy in case of failure.

Gateway shipped its server with a 2.8GHz Intel 820 Pentium D dual-core CPU backed by 2GB of RAM and four 146GB hard disks in a RAID 5 array for almost a half-terabyte of total storage — more than enough for most SMBs.

Making use of all this hardware is Microsoft Small Business Server, a standard selection for the E-9220T compared with the Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition default for the Dell machines. Small Business Server makes the E-9220T a great all-in-one SOHO box, combining file and print with e-mail and collaboration services, whereas Dell’s use of Windows Server 2003 Standard makes it more suitable as an add-on workgroup machine aimed at dedicated tasks.

In our environment, for example, my development team grabbed the Dell 850 and immediately began using it as an application server. The Gateway was used less because our office already has an e-mail/file/print machine, and we didn’t want to supplant it.

Where the E-9220T fell behind both of the Dell machines was in bundled management tools. Basically, it has nothing outside of what’s already provided in Windows. For an all-in-one small-business service machine, that’s skimpy, but probably enough; still, a hardware-health monitoring utility would have been nice.

Dual-core performance

After running each server through its paces, I decided to test the dual-core CPUs to see whether there really was a noticeable performance gain for CPU-intensive tasks. To do so, I rolled out DMark, a custom benchmark we designed several years ago as part of a relational database test. The test is written in 1005 Java and requires a JVM on all client machines. I rewrote our database queries and supplanted them with several threads of complex fractal calculations; the essence of DMark lies in the time a product takes to complete these calculations.

Using a dual Pentium 4 2.8GHz (single-core) HP workstation as a comparison, I ran DMark on all three machines. Results were as expected, with the 2.8GHz Gateway lagging slightly behind the 3.2GHz Dells. When compared with the dual-CPU HP, however, the Pentium D really showed its stuff, beating the HP by almost 30 percent in three test iterations. Granted, CPU-intensive tasks are somewhat rare on an SMB all-purpose file server, but it’s nice to know the muscle and longevity are there when you need them.

Any of these three machines would do a solid job in most SMB settings. The PowerEdge 850 may be the least-suited to a true SMB environment, as its second identity is definitely aimed at being part of a cluster. The PowerEdge 830 outshone the Gateway not only in terms of bundled management software but also in terms of price, coming in at almost $1,000 less than the E-9220T. However, if you don’t need higher-level server management tools, the E-9220T is a solid — if slightly pricey — SMB workhorse.