Product Reviews

AMD certainly threw a spanner in Intel's works when it launched the Opteron processor last year, and many blue-chip server manufacturers have now realised they can't afford to miss out on this market's potential. IBM supports this technology and HP is now joining the AMD club via its ProLiant DL145 and DL585 rack servers. HP's strategy with its Opteron-based servers is to offer those companies with large investments in 32-bit computing an easy migration path to 64-bit computing in the future. It will continue to offer its Itanium-based Integrity servers to companies exclusively running 64-bit applications but expects sales to be dented slightly by its new Opteron alternatives.

The launch of HP's Opteron servers is a tale of two very different products. For the dual-Opteron DL145, HP merely took AMD's A2210 package, which was the result of the latter's Validated Server Program with manufacturer Celestica. However, instead of employing AMD's Quartet quad-processor platform, the DL585 is an all-HP affair that aims to offer a far superior design and build quality. This 4U chassis has two large bays at the front to accept the chunky 800W hot-plug supplies and to one side is a hard disk cage with room for up to four hot-swap drives. A small switch inside the chassis can be used to determine whether the backplane operates in simplex or duplex modes.

Of far more interest is what lies beneath, and with the easily removable lid out of the way you'll be greeted by a very tasty specification laid out in a superbly designed interior. Cooling is very high on the agenda, with four hot-swap fans positioned behind the drive and power supply bays. Tool-free maintenance is the order of the day and cabling has been reduced to an absolute minimum. IBM is always proud of its 'light-path' diagnostics panel, but HP takes the idea a stage further with an array above the power supplies that has a status LED for virtually every component in the server. HP's motherboard sits behind the fan assembly, and the company is to be applauded on its choice of location for the processors. The Opteron modules get their own dedicated controller boards and each is accompanied by no less than eight DIMM sockets. The boards

ADVERTISEMENT

are stacked neatly to the right of the expansion slots and a simple lever mechanism on each one makes them very easy to remove and replace - certainly much easier than Intel's quad Xeon solution. Each processor has a large passive heatsink fitted and another bank of four hot-swap fans is located behind these assemblies.

The review system came with a quartet of Opteron 848 2.2GHz processors, each accompanied by 2GB of PC2100 memory. The total can be upgraded to a massive 64GB once 4GB modules become widely available. If you want to start small, the system can be supplied with processor modules one and two fitted, but the third and fourth modules must be installed as a pair. Only the second module must have memory installed, and you can add to the other boards in any order as required.

Storage options are commendable: the motherboard sports an integrated Ultra320 RAID controller complete with 64MB of cache memory and battery backup pack. The latter two components are located underneath the front fan assembly, but this is also very easy to remove for access. Even more impressive is the fact that the cache memory and battery module can be lifted and placed in another DL585 server without loss of cache data.

As the server was supplied without an OS, we had a chance to use HP's SmartStart bootable CD-ROM to remedy this. It offers a simple routine that guides you through loading your chosen OS along with the necessary drivers and HP utilities. For general browser-based remote management and monitoring, you can use HP's Insight Manager, which offers plenty of information about system operations and good alerting facilities. Designed to manage any HP server with the Insight agent installed, it provides a tidy interface from where you can browse the network and view remote systems. The integrated lights-out (iLO) controller adds even more possibilities as this allows the server to be accessed securely via a browser regardless of its condition. Again, the interface is well designed and lets you monitor the status of the controller and server, view installed components, access the iLO log and run diagnostics. A remote control session with the server can be established, but note this feature is an optional extra. Full access to power is also provided so you can reset the server, power it off and on, and emulate pressing the power button.

The DL585 represents HP's first move into Opteron territory and will prove a hard act to follow. Build quality and design are exemplary, while remote management and monitoring features are impressive, as are expansion potential and fault tolerance. The price gets you a very good hardware specification that competes well with current Xeon MP solutions but has the added bonus of a clear migration path for moving to 64-bit computing.