Product Reviews

In the world of high-density rack-mount servers, slim is beautiful - the lower the profile, the more processing power you can pack into a given amount of floor space. IBM set the ball rolling earlier this year with its Netfinity 4000R (reviewed enterprise, issue 69) as it managed to squeeze an impressive specification into a 1U chassis that's only 1.75in high. Compaq has also been busy this year and the new ProLiant DL360 rack-mount server looks set to steal some of IBM's thunder as it manages to fit an even better specification into its 1U chassis and adds some excellent design concepts.

The DL360 is housed in a sturdy steel chassis and comes as standard with fixed racking rails. Storage is particularly well catered for with a pair of 18.2Gb Wide Ultra160 SCSI hard disks mounted at the front in hot-plug carriers. Compaq scores higher here as the 4000R has its hard disks mounted inside the chassis. Alongside, Compaq has just enough room to fit a low-profile 24-speed CD-ROM drive, a floppy drive and a small bank of indicators showing power status plus network and hard disk activity, as well as a blue server identification LED.

The top panel is removed by depressing a pair of metal buttons and sliding it backwards. Just a quick glance at the DL360's innards shows how much thought has gone into its design as there are no ribbon cables to ruin its symmetry. Compaq has paid particular attention to air flow and advised us that it carried out smoke tests similar to those used in wind tunnels to ensure that air was correctly directed through the chassis. A removable power supply sits behind the floppy/CD-ROM combo, and is equipped with three small fans, while a powerful blower fan is mounted behind the hard disks.

Compaq's motherboard offers a far superior specification to IBM's 4000R. There are no surprises in the core logic department with the ubiquitous ServerWorks ServerSet III LE chipset in residence offering a 133MHz FSB and support for up to 4Gb of PC133 SDRAM memory. Processing power is particularly good as the review system came equipped with a pair of 800MHz Pentium

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III modules. These are the Flip Chip-Pin Grid Array (FC-PGA) variety which use the same 370-pin ZIF socket as the Intel Celeron. This allows manufacturers to produce slimline servers and workstations, but still offer the same power as SC242 socket-equipped systems. Alongside one of the processors are four DIMM sockets tipped over at around thirty degrees with three holding a total of 512Mb of memory.

Further expansion is possible as a vertical riser card provides one 32-bit, 33MHz and one 64-bit, 33MHz PCI slot with enough room for full-length cards. Installation is simplified as the entire assembly complete with its metal frame is removed, a card slotted into place and the whole lot plugged back into the system board.

There's more innovation to come as the DL360 has an integrated dual-channel Wide Ultra2 Symbios RAID-on-a-chip (ROC) controller supported by 8Mb of read cache. With room for two hard drives inside, only RAID levels 0 or 1 are available, but even this can be modified. Compaq provides a special cable that plugs into the system board and either a PCI RAID or SCSI controller card to bypass the ROC chipset. This allows an external RAID configuration to be created that can include the internal drives. The network connection is well served as the DL360 has a pair of integrated Compaq NC3163 dual-speed adaptor chipsets. These can be teamed together for fault-tolerant links or adaptive load-balancing but I couldn't see any evidence of support for 802.1Q VLANs. IBM designed the 4000R to be connected directly to a console selector switch, so it has a single proprietary port at the rear. This isn't the case with the DL360, which has the full array of monitor, mouse, keyboard, serial port and even a very high-density SCSI port for connecting external tape drives.

As usual, first time installation is helped admirably by Compaq's SmartStart utility which provides assistance with loading your choice of OS. It can be used to view the system configuration and run diagnostics. Management and monitoring facilities are extensive as Insight Manager keeps you in touch with the server's vital statistics and Compaq's ASR2 (automatic server restart) also comes into play as it can reboot or power down the server if it spots a critical error.

The DL360 is clearly the end result of careful thought and good design concepts. It packs a superb specification into a chassis that's less than three fingers thick and includes an integrated RAID controller and hot-plug disks. The only drawback I can see is the comparatively high price. Although the DL360 offers a superior hardware package, the review model costs nearly twice as much as IBM's Netfinity 4000R.