Olivetti NetStrada 2600ideRAID review

There's no doubt that Olivetti Personal Computers (OP Computers) went through a turbulent time during the 1990s, but it looks like the name will continue for a while yet as the result of an acquisition program by the Mekfin Group. Mekfin formed ICS in 1999 after acquiring Italian-based OP Computers and uses the ICS Olivetti commercial name to brand its IT products. Along with a comprehensive range of desktop PCs, laptops and monitors, ICS Olivetti also offers a wide choice of servers catering for small businesses up to the enterprise.

There's been a great deal of interest in IDE-based RAID controllers recently, as they offer the same high levels of redundancy as their SCSI counterparts but cost considerably less. The 2600 brings this all together in a low-cost system specifically aimed at small businesses looking for an entry-level server with some degree of fault tolerance.

The RAID options aren't overly exciting, as the 2600 employs a MegaRAID 795 Ultra100 PCI controller card - now known as a MegaRAID IDE100 since LSI Logic's acquisition of AMI's RAID business at the beginning of September. The card supports RAID-0, -1 and -0+1 arrays, so you can use striped arrays for higher disk performance, mirrored arrays for fault tolerance or combine the two types together. There's little else to say about it, because it provides a similar level of features to Adaptec's budget-priced ATA RAID 1200A card (see enterprise, issue 85, p233). A pair of IDE channels supports a total of four drives and, unless you want to implement a -0+1 array, you can keep a spare drive handy as a hot standby.

The server itself is reasonably well built with good levels of physical security, as the side panel can only be removed once the top panel has been released. The lever for this is hidden behind the lockable front door, which also denies access to the hard disks - even the power button can be locked with a key to prevent it being operated. Two 5.25in bays are provided, with one occupied by a 52-speed IDE CD-ROM drive. Underneath is a hard disk cage with room for four drives, and the review system came equipped with a brace of 20.4Gb Fujitsu drives. As the system was supplied without any OS installed, we configured the drives as a RAID-1 mirrored array from the BIOS setup.

General array monitoring is provided by a MegaRAID IDE Console utility, which is installed as an MMC (Microsoft Management Console) snap-in. It provides a tidy interface with plenty of information about physical and logical drives, although detected errors can't be linked to an alerting system. To test the RAID card, we simulated a drive failure by removing power from one of the array members, at which point an internal buzzer sounded, followed rapidly by a pop-up warning message. Once the drive was replaced, an Array Rebuild utility was automatically fired up to provide a comprehensive status report on the proceedings.

So far, so good, but replacing a faulty drive is no simple task. The RAID card doesn't support hot-swapping, so the system must be powered down first. The carriers are secured in the drive bay with three screws, one of which can only be accessed once the right-hand side panel has been removed followed by an internal inspection hatch, which is held in place with four screws. The carrier screws also use fiddly little metal spacer tubes, which will stop the drive from being withdrawn if they aren't removed as well.

Instead of opting for the more common ServerWorks-equipped motherboards, Olivetti has plumped for an MSI MS-6309 main board instead. The audio ports at the rear shows this to be designed more for the desktop market, although it does redeem itself in that it uses a VIA Apollo Pro 133A core logic chipset, which supports 133MHz SDRAM memory. Dual processing isn't an option, as the motherboard only sports a single FC-PGA socket. The review system came supplied with a 1GHz Pentium III module. Alongside are three DIMM sockets, two filled with 256Mb modules. Maximum memory supported by the VIA chipset is only 1.5Gb, although this will be more than enough for the target market.