Product Reviews

Transtec is a force to be reckoned with in the European server market. Its product range has grown rapidly over the past year, it's acquiring storage companies by the bucket-load and, according to a recent IDC report, it started 2004 by moving into the top-ten list of server manufacturers. The company attributes its success to the fact that it has focused primarily on HA (high availability), HPC (high-performance computing) and clustering applications, and has traditionally sourced its server products from Supermicro and Intel.

The company's 1001 EIDE server represents our first look at Intel's new entry-level rack-server package. Aimed primarily at HPC and application-server environments, this low-cost system comprises Intel's SR1350-E 1U chassis and its SE7210TP1-E motherboard. Referring to the base model in transtec's 1001 server range, the model name is misleading as the system on review comes with Serial ATA (SATA) storage rather than ATA/100. Build quality is far better than its design, but the chassis certainly looks and feels rugged enough for the target market. The review system came with the optional 24x CD-ROM drive (not included in the price above), while there's a small panel showing the status of the system plus drive and network activity. Power and reset/sleep buttons are located alongside, but both are unprotected and can't be disabled from the BIOS. Standard systems come with a pair of fixed hard disks located behind the front panel, but Intel's flex bay allows the CD-ROM to be dispensed with and replaced by a third fixed drive. The motherboard only has a pair of SATA interfaces but the controller offers Adaptec's HostRAID feature, which supports mirrored and striped arrays.

The lid is protected by an intrusion-detection switch and underneath you'll find a basic but tidy interior. Behind the hard disks is a bank of five small radial cooling fans. Called an Active AirFlow pack, Intel is quite proud of these as they provide instrumentation data to the server-management software and are variable speed. A nice idea, but as we've found in so many other rack servers these fans generate high noise levels that preclude them from being used in an office environment. A fast 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor is located plumb in the centre of the small motherboard and covered in a plastic shroud that doesn't do anything

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to reduce noise levels either. Alongside and underneath the shroud are four DIMM sockets. The E7210 chipset supports PC3200 memory and expansion up to a maximum of 4GB; 1GB is supplied as standard.

Graphics are dealt with by the ubiquitous ATi Rage XL chipset and 8MB of RAM, while a pair of Intel Ethernet adaptors looks after the network connection. Bizarrely, when virtually all rack servers are now coming with dual gigabit Ethernet adaptors, Intel has opted to provide one gigabit and one Fast Ethernet connection. The PROSet II utility does allow these to be configured into teams but these will only run at the speed of the slowest link.

Naturally, for remote server management and monitoring you get the standard Intel software bundle, which is designed to do away with the need for a remote management card. The Server Management Console allows you to search the network for Intel servers with the relevant agents installed, then remotely monitor and control them. Selecting one takes you over to the Platform Instrumentation Control console, where you keep an eye on vital hardware functions such as fan operations, memory errors, temperatures and voltages. Alerting options are extensive, as you can tie in upper and lower thresholds with a wide range of actions including logging to disk, email, pager notification and network broadcast. For critical errors you can shut down or reset the operating system or server, execute a power-off sequence or request an immediate hardware reset if a fault is detected.

The server does offer basic support for the IPMI specification as the motherboard has a simple mBMC (mini-Baseboard Management Controller). This supports a subset of IPMI over LAN features but not serial port or modem connections. Consequently, the server can't be accessed locally via Intel's DPC (direct platform control) Console Manager utility as this functions only over a network connection. We found the latter worked well enough and allowed us to remotely power-off, power-on or reset the server and activate the console redirection. Other useful features include managers that allow you to directly access log files of system events, field-replaceable units and the motherboard's sensor-data records. Overall, Intel's management tools are easy enough to use but could do with a spring clean as some are looking dated. Also, it's about time Intel moved over to a browser interface from which all tools can be collectively accessed, allowing management to be more streamlined, accessible and secure.

Although we weren't overly impressed by the noise levels and Intel's management facilities, the transtec 1001 EIDE server offers a good value proposition as a low-cost computer node. However, check out the equally noisy Gigabyte-based alternative from Rackservers.com (see issue 120, p182). This offers an almost identical specification for virtually the same price but delivers better remote management tools.