Product Reviews

The current crop of 1U rack-mount servers is now capable of packing impressive specifications into their slimline chassis. One area they all fall down on, though, is storage capacity, as most only have enough room for three hard disks. Unfortunately, more storage means a larger chassis and fewer processors per rack system.

If you're more concerned with storage than processing power, however, the R16-1920G from specialist Rackservers.com looks a good candidate - it packs 16 hard disks into its 4U chassis. It delivers this enormous capacity on low-cost IDE drives, with the system on review supplied with a full complement of 120GB IBM Deskstar drives that offer a whopping 1.9TB of storage.

Build quality is good, with all drives protected by a lockable front door that also prevents access to the slimline 24x CD-ROM, floppy drive and top-panel securing screw. Security is tightened further, as each drive carrier has its own key-operated lock.

Every effort has been made to squeeze as many drives as possible into the server's 19in width. The array module offers three banks of five bays and a single vertical bay in a gap on the right-hand side. The carrier locking handles feel flimsy, but overall build quality is reasonable and each tray provides drive activity and power status indicators.

As you'd expect with such a high chassis, there's plenty of room inside, making for swift upgrade manoeuvres. The drive array assembly is a self-contained unit taking up the front half of the chassis and accompanied by a bank of five large cooling fans. You'll want to keep this system in a dedicated server room, though, as operational noise levels are high.

The rear half is home to a Tyan Thunder S2688 motherboard - a good choice as it's designed specifically for server applications. Tyan goes with the flow in the core logic department, as the motherboard uses the popular ServerSet III HE-SL chipset. This provides a boost to performance, as the memory subsystem uses a two-way interleaved configuration, which provides a 144-bit memory bus.

Memory modules must be installed in pairs and both must be the same type, brand and speed. The six DIMM sockets support a maximum of 6GB of memory, with the review system equipped with 1GB spread across two modules. The pair of FC-PGA sockets at the rear are occupied by 1.1GHz Pentium III processors topped off with large heatsinks and dedicated cooling fans,

Standard SCSI services are handled by an embedded Adaptec AIC-7899W Ultra160 chipset. You won't be using this, though, because you get a pair of 3ware Escalade 7810 PCI IDE RAID controller cards that provide eight channels apiece and support hardware-implemented RAID-0, -1, -5, -10 and JBOD arrays. Each group of eight IBM drives was configured as a RAID-5 array, providing 864GB of formatted storage apiece.

The 3ware cards are good choices, as they offer some unique features. StorSwitch technology replaces the shared bus found in SCSI systems and provides a dedicated channel to each IDE drive, so no master and slave designations need to be made. RAID-1 mirrors also get a boost, as 3ware's TwinStor uses both drives when reading data instead of just using the second drive as a copy. It maintains a history of data accesses to distinguish between random and sequential reads and uses this information to determine when to use both drives in the mirror to retrieve data.

A consequence of having dedicated channels is that each drive must be connected to the controller with its own ribbon cable. However, clutter has been kept to a minimum - the cables are all tied together neatly and routed carefully through the chassis.

Network services are well catered for, with Tyan including a pair of embedded Intel PRO100+ server adaptor chipsets providing two dual-speed network ports. The bundled Intel ProSet II utility allows you to team the two together to create fault-tolerant or load-balanced links. Redundancy also extends to power, as the chassis comes with three hot-swap 250W supplies fitted in an integral unit with two input sockets.

The server was supplied without any management facilities, as Tyan's server management connector wasn't available at the time of review. Costing £75, this provides features such as remote rebooting and monitoring of processors, fans, voltages and temperatures. RAID options are plentiful - 3ware bundles its 3DM management utility, which provides a tidy web browser interface from which you can view and monitor the controllers and RAID arrays.

Alerting options are basic, since they only extend to sounding an audible warning if an error is detected or sending an email to one recipient. Hot-standby and replacement drives can be introduced into an array from here, while maintenance tasks such as rebuilds, array verification and media scans can be scheduled to run outside normal hours.

There's no denying the R16-1920G packs a mighty punch when it comes to storage - this is the highest capacity we've seen in any rack-mount server. The IDE-based storage and 3ware RAID cards are a smart partnership that keeps costs down, but not at the expense of features. We've yet to see Tyan's server management tools, but as long as the company delivers on these the R16-1920G looks a good, cost-effective choice for applications where masses of RAID-protected storage is a priority.