Roaming the midrange

MIDRANGE SERVERS ARE nearly the perfect solution for enterprises looking for reasonably priced, general-purpose devices to support departments, Web sites, and e-commerce applications. These servers are big enough to have all of the redundancy and serviceability of their larger brethren, and their prices are low enough for them to be rational purchases for all but the smallest companies.

Most servers in this range have two processors, a few have four. Most have embedded RAID storage. All have hot-swappable power supplies and disk drives. Most exhibit excellent redundancy, and most can be managed remotely. The greatest differences you’re likely to see in this genre are in processor speed, the chip sets, the number of supported processors and disk drives, and the level of serviceability and redundancy. To some extent, these differences are trade-offs. You might have more hot-swappable power supplies but space for fewer hot-swappable disk drives, for example.

Those differences were clearly demonstrated when we looked at servers from two highly competitive manufacturers, Gateway and MicronPC (which will soon be changing its name to MPC). The Gateway 980 rests on one end of the midrange-server spectrum: It’s fast, with two Intel Xeon 2.4GHz processors, and it’s expandable, but it suffers limited serviceability and management and lacks some important redundancy features.

The MicronPC NetFrame 6500 is on the other end. It’s not as expandable, and it uses slower 1.4GHz processors. But the NetFrame is easy to manage, easy to service, and has all the redundancy you’re likely to need. Both of these servers cost roughly the same, so choosing one over the other should be based more on meeting your needs than meeting a specific price.

Opening the Gateway

Gateway 980 is designed to be used either with a rack mount (it’s a 5U device) or a pedestal mount. This allows companies to choose basically the same server for a wide variety of uses, from stand-alone use in a remote office to being part of the datacenter. With eight hot-swappable drive bays, it’s very expandable, and it has some redundancy, given that both power supplies are hot-swappable from the rear of the server.

Gateway includes a gigabit NIC (network interface card) with support for 10Mbps, 100Mbps, or 1,000Mbps over copper. A flimsy plastic panel locks into place over the disk drives, and it inconveniently won’t stay closed if it’s not locked. The entire front cover, which includes the locking panel, removes easily, regardless of whether the panel is locked, so you can get access if you need it. You’ll need to remove the front cover to reach the knurled screws that allow you to release the top of the server and thereby gain access to the inside. The internal fans, also accessible beneath the cover, are not hot-swappable and are connected via power leads that are difficult to reach.

Unlike some competing servers, including the NetFrame, Gateway 980 does not include an inlaid chart of major components, so servicing the unit is slightly more difficult than it should be.

Thank you, Intel

MicronPC approaches its NetFrame 6500 from a different direction. In fact, the company doesn’t even build this server itself; it buys the server from Intel and then adds its name, the Intel NICs, and any bundled software. Regardless of the source, the NetFrame server demonstrates good engineering and thoughtful design. Major components, such as the hot-swappable disks and power supplies, can be swapped out from the front without the server having to be removed from, or even slid out of, the rack.

In addition, the NetFrame includes niceties such as redundant hot-swappable fans. The server is fully equipped, and you can find details ranging from fan RPM to processor temperature by using the excellent Intel Server Manager software, which is included. Management is made especially easy because MicronPC includes a separate management NIC with connectors available on both the front and rear panels of the server. You can accomplish out-of-band management with this NIC or via a dial-in connection.

For production use, the NetFrame 6500 uses a copper-gigabit NIC that will support speeds of 10Mbps, 100Mbps, or 1,000 Mbps. But the NetFrame 6500 we tested could hold only five hot-swappable hard disks; you can, however, order an optional configuration in a 7U chassis that will hold five more.

You can access the interior of the NetFrame 6500 by releasing knurled screws on the rear of the server and sliding the top back. Inside, the fans are configured in four groups of two, and you remove one simply by lifting it out of the chassis.

The Intel-made NetFrame uses hyperthreading, which allows the operating system to treat the two processors as four. We didn’t see any evidence of this allowing the server to perform twice as fast, but our testing was not CPU-intensive. (For results of hyper-threading tests on the Xeon DP, see ” Seeing double “, Feb. 25, page 17).

Decisions, decisions

So how should you choose between these two servers? If you’re looking for a solution that will live in your datacenter, the choice is easy: The NetFrame 6500 will meet your needs and meet them well. It compares favorably with the Dell and Compaq servers we tested earlier this year(see ” Fast and Flexible ,” Oct. 14), and it should provide service that’s just as good. Despite its limited drive capacity, the NetFrame 6500 is a fine server that promises effective management and easy servicing. In the long run, this means that the server will cost you less to maintain and will be more reliable. It’s hard to find anything wrong with that.

The Gateway 980, on the other hand, is not without merit. Its eight hot-swappable drives provide vast quantities of internally mounted storage. And it’s nearly twice as fast as the NetFrame. But its limited redundancy, lack of some hot-swappable components, and limited standard management software miss the mark, especially because other servers in its price range provide them.