Product Reviews

It's not easy being green but many businesses - and in particular data centres - are now finding they must address these issues for a number of reasons.

With some larger sites maxing out their utility supply they need to do more with what they have and this means running more power-efficient servers.

As winner of the PC Pro Environmental Innovator of the Year award in 2007, VeryPC has turned its expertise on this knotty problem: the result is the GreenServer Janus, which aims to deliver a high processing density but claims an average power consumption of only 224w.

You might initially think that this power consumption for a 1U rack server isn't anything special but bear in mind the Janus has 16 Xeon cores on offer.

You could also be forgiven for thinking that VeryPC has somehow managed to cram four of the latest 7300 Xeon MP processors into this slim-line chassis but in fact the count is made up from a quartet of quad-core Xeon DPs.

Once the lid is off it all becomes much clearer as the Janus is a cunning combination of two motherboards so is actually two separate servers.

This is an all-Supermicro affair with the chassis home to a pair of X7DBT-INF boards, each fitted with low-power L5320 Xeon quad-core processors.

At the front are four standard 3.5in. hot-swap drive bays and VeryPC has included a pair of 500GB Western Digital GreenPower SATA hard disks for each server. WD claims these drives can deliver an average saving of 4-5w over competitors' products. For improved cooling, the space above the hard disk bays has been left empty to allow for better airflow.

Clearly, there's a lot to cram into the chassis but a few nifty design touches have overcome any major problems. The two separate motherboards are mounted opposite each other where they run the length of the chassis and are separated by a shared cold-swap power supply module. With no power redundancy this server must clearly be run on a UPS.

The pair of Xeons are mounted towards the front and fitted with solid copper heatsinks while behind these are eight DIMM sockets supporting up to 32GB of FB-DIMM memory.

Each motherboard sports Intel quad-port SATA controllers which support stripes, mirrors and RAID-5 arrays but Supermicro's reluctance to embrace 2.5in SFF hard disk technology limits your

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choice to a fault tolerant mirror.

We've seen Supermicro use the smaller drives in its latest blade server but why it won't implement them in its rack servers is beyond us.

With so many components having reduced power requirements, VeryPC has attacked operational noise issues by removing two cooling fans per motherboard leaving each with only one. It's a pity the internal fan in the power supply is so raucous as this could be one quiet server.

As the motherboards are the INF variety you also get a Mellanox InfiniBand chip with a single 20Gbps port presented at the rear panel allowing servers to be brought together over a high-speed connection or for implementing a SAN.

There's even more room to expand as each motherboard sports a riser card with an 8X PCI-e slot that accepts half-height cards. However, these cannot be used on the review system as VeryPC kitted out each server with the optional SIMSO+ remote management cards that present a header to the backplate with a dedicated ethernet port.

These use a Raritan KVM over IP chip allowing both servers to be accessed remotely via a web browser. It provides a well-featured interface from where you can monitor and remotely control the server, control power and set up virtual boot devices.

You also get the SuperO Doctor III utility included which offers remote and local server monitoring along with operational details on all critical system components.

So far so good, but when it came to our power-consumption tests we found the Janus to have a slightly bigger appetite than it claims. Both servers were running Windows Server 2003 and with the single power supply hooked up to our in-line power meter we saw a total draw of 265w in idle.

With SiSoft Sandra pushing all 16 cores to more than 95% utilization, we saw this peak at 390w. Admittedly, this isn't quite as environmentally friendly as VeryPC claims, but after discussion we came to the conclusion that the extra InfiniBand adapters and RMM modules were adding to the load.

Also, to put the results in perspective, take a look at the power tests we ran last month on Transtec's 4200 Premium Server. With four quad-core 7300 Xeon MPs on board, this server pulled 347w in idle and 470w under heavy processing load.

Consider the fact that the GreenServer Janus is offering two well-equipped servers almost for the price of one and you have a very unusual rack solution at a good price. The single power supply is a potential liability that needs to be covered but for sheer processing density plus low power consumption there's little to touch this server.