VA Technologies CentriX-200

AMD has consistently played second fiddle to Intel in the processor wars, but the Opteron could redress the balance of power, as AMD is staking everything on the 64-bit question. True, Intel's Itanium has been available for a while, with the second generation released over a year ago, but it hasn't been without its own problems and AMD has a number of tricks up its sleeve that it hopes will make a big difference. For a full rundown of the Opteron platform's features and benefits, check out our review of Armari's RM-O60-1MS.

Next up on the catwalk is the CentriX-200 from VA Technologies. This 2U rack server brings together an interesting mix of chassis and motherboard, and a key focus of this review will be to see what features it has to offer compared to the current Xeon alternatives. We've already noted the limited choice of 64-bit operating systems and applications, with Windows Server 2003 Opteron support only currently in 32-bit mode, so for the present AMD and Intel are vying for the same space in the high-density processing marketplace.

The CentriX-200 package is wrapped in a well-built Supermicro SC822-400RC chassis that delivers six hot-swap drive bays. The system came supplied with four 18.4GB Seagate Cheetah Ultra320 hard disks. Alongside are low-profile CD-ROM and floppy drives and there's room below for an internal 5.25in device. The chassis also comes complete with a pair of 400W hot-swap power supplies. However, what's underneath the lid is of far more interest - our first motherboard from Rioworks.

Part of the Arima Group, Rioworks is a relative stranger to these shores but offers a range of Opteron- and Xeon-based rack-server solutions. The HDAMA motherboard is well designed and laid out in a similar fashion to Supermicro's Xeon boards. Suffice to say, the HDAMA looks very comfortable in the Supermicro chassis. The system came supplied with a pair of Opteron 242 processors running at 1.6GHz, which were topped off with large heatsinks complete with integral fans. General cooling is well catered for, as a bank of four large fans runs the width of the chassis and each is hot-swappable. The HDAMA provides two separate banks of four DIMM sockets alongside each processor and came supplied with 2GB of DDR333 memory, which can be upgraded to 16GB - the same as Intel E7501-equipped Xeon boards.

The extra height of the 2U chassis has been put to good use for expansion, as a riser card provides a pair of 64-bit PCI slots. Storage options differ substantially from most Xeon motherboards, with the HDAMA not offering any integrated SCSI services. Instead, it sports an embedded Promise quad-port Serial ATA RAID controller. VA Technologies advised us that stability of the Serial ATA backplane option was poor during its own tests so it opted to fit an LSI MegaRAID Ultra320 controller card. This was equipped with 64MB of cache memory plus a battery backup pack and was configured to manage the four Seagate drives as a RAID-5 array. Gigabit Ethernet comes into the network equation too, as the HDAMA includes a pair of integrated Broadcom NetXtreme triple-speed adaptors and, as with their Intel counterparts, these can be teamed up into fault-tolerant or load-balanced links.

VA Technologies is targeting this system at database applications and as a 'high throughput' server, so redundancy, fault tolerance and remote management need to be good. The system scores well on the first two counts, but fails to impress as much on the third. Although the motherboard supports the IPMI (intelligent platform management interface) 1.5 specification, no baseboard controller is currently available from Rioworks. The Cyclades remote-management card included in this package goes some considerable way to make up for this. It provides remote control over the server and power-cycling, plus full health monitoring. It also comes with its own power supply, so the server can be controlled even when powered down. LSI's MegaRAID utility provides array-monitoring tools, but these are looking tired now and don't offer any worthwhile alerting facilities. The price also includes Intel's LANDesk management software, although we were baffled to find VA Technologies had installed the Desktop Manager component rather than the more relevant Server Manager.