Product Reviews

Transtec rates itself as one of the leading server providers in Europe and it's easy to see why. The company's product range just gets bigger each year. Transtec has traditionally sourced its rack and pedestal server products from Supermicro and Intel. The latest 1003W Server on review brings together yet another fine partnership between the two, with storage high on the agenda.

The 1003W is one of a pair of all-Supermicro 3U rack servers offered with either SCSI or SATA storage. The review system was supplied with two 146GB Ultra320 SCSI hard disks, but with no fewer than 14 hot-swap bays this server has bags of room for expanson. There's plenty of power fault tolerance on tap as well. The system comes equipped as standard with a trio of 380W hot-plug power supplies easily accessible at the rear.

The SC933S2 is one of the newest members of Supermicro's 3U chassis family and actually sports 15 bays, with the furthest left occupied by a small module that routes a pair of USB ports and an RJ-45 serial port to the front. It also has mounting points inside for fitting a 2.5in SATA hard disk, although the manual doesn't go into any detail about this. Supermicro indicates that it would be possible to install the OS on this, but from a fault-tolerance perspective this is hardly practical, and Transtec advised us it doesn't support its use anyway.

Overall build quality is good. It's never going to be as solid as an IBM server, but the chassis is sturdy enough for general server-room duties. As we've come to expect from Supermicro, the interior of the chassis is well designed and tidily put together. With such a high storage potential, cooling needs to be efficient, and for starters you get four large 9cm hot-swap fans mounted directly behind the hard disk backplane. A clear plastic shroud envelopes the processors and memory sockets. Airflow is aided further by a pair of smaller hot-swap fans at the rear of the assembly. Transtec has opted for a Supermicro X6DH8-XG2 motherboard, which is equipped with a fine specification for the price and offers good expansion potential. The pair of 3GHz Xeons are topped off with solid copper heatsinks, and only two of the eight DIMM sockets are occupied by 1GB PC3200 modules, leaving plenty of

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Standard storage features on the review system are basic, with the motherboard sporting an Adaptec dual-channel Ultra320 chipset. Note that the hard disk backplane is only the single-channel variety, so it isn't possible to split the backplane across both channels. Although not included with the review system, RAID will be a natural progression, and this system supports a number of alternatives. The most obvious is an Adaptec ZCR (zero channel RAID) 2010S controller card, as the lowest PCI slot supports this. Once installed, it takes over both SCSI channels and provides RAID0, 1 or 5 array capabilities. There are other options too, as Transtec offers a range of RAID cards with a choice of cache memory and battery backup packs.

Supermicro motherboards customarily sprout plenty of embedded sensors, so server management is very much on the cards. The bundled SuperO Doctor III utility looks after this and offers a smart remote web browser interface. It provides plenty of operational data, so you can keep a close eye on general system health, monitor critical system components and send out warnings if failures or problems such as high temperatures are detected. The alerting feature supports both pager and email messaging, and you can pick and choose from fan speeds, voltages, processor and chassis temperatures, plus chassis-intrusion items you want to monitor. Remote-control facilities are provided, so you can access the server from another system, gracefully shutdown the OS, control power and redirect the server's console. With this level of remote access, security needs to be good, and the utility supports administrative users with full access and operators who are allowed to view but not modify settings or control the server. A reporting facility is provided as well, although it only outputs its findings on the system, administration and events in CSV format.

The system is also supplied as standard with Supermicro's IPMI 2-compliant baseboard management controller. This provides plenty of extra remote access features, including improved network discovery tools and a SOL (serial over LAN) feature, which provides serial redirection and support for multiple serial connections to the same management port. The bundled IPMI View utility is used to access this information remotely and provides readouts on temperatures, fan speeds and voltages. Controls are provided for recycling power and performing graceful server shutdowns or reboots, as well as remotely accessing and controlling the chassis' power and reset buttons.

Supermicro servers rarely fail to impress, as they combine a fine mix of features, build quality, design and value. The 1003W Server is an excellent example of this philosophy. Its sheer expansion potential makes it an ideal candidate for running storage-centric applications.