Primergy 560: What to look for in enterprise server

Primergy 560: What to look for in enterprise server

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): In the office where I work, the researchers and
the administrative staff use no fewer than 21 stand-alone PCs
plus five notebooks.

As you can immediately see, we are wasting a lot of resources.
First, each of these PCs has a printer that is idle most of the
time. Second, when the time comes for all of us to start using
original software, the cost will be horrendous because we will
have to buy 26 copies. Third, there are no standards in the
office. For instance, the researchers use whatever word
processing program that they happen to have mastered during the
years they were studying abroad. Some use WordPerfect, some use
Ami Pro, and others use Winword. When it's time to consolidate
our research findings into one report, we always face the onus of
converting each other's document files. Believe me, it's a lot of
hassle, particularly when the individual reports contain a lot of
tables. Fourth, when any one of these machines develops a hiccup,
I always get a migraine because it invariably means I'll have to
spend two or three hours cleaning up the hard disk, reorganizing
the files on it and adjusting the various parameters to make it
work smoothly again.

Had we purchased a server and connected it to all the PCs in a
network, life would have been simpler and more efficient. We
could install standard programs that everybody would be forced to
learn and use. We could enjoy a lot of the many other advantages
that a network environment has to offer.

Requirements

Although I'm still in the learning stage as far as networks
and servers are concerned, I have often heard of entry-level and
mission-critical servers. Our general notion of an entry-level
server is usually a fast machine with a lot of hard disk space
and a secondary storage device for backing up all the data. This
is probably what my office requires at this point.

Mission-critical servers are different. First, with a
continuous supply of power from a battery-based uninterruptible
power supply, these PCs will never go to sleep because of power
failure. More importantly, they should never fail because their
hard disks break down, their power supply burns out or their
EtherNet card fails. They should be as close as possible to being
100 percent reliable.

Therefore, a server should also be equipped with a set of
automated tools that will warn us if and when any of its
components are already on the threshold of failure. Given the
complexity of a server, you can imagine how sophisticated these
tools could be. Incidentally, have you ever been stuck without
cash, at Glodok Plaza in West Jakarta, because the ATM server in
your bank was down? I bet you have, maybe even often at times.
Had the server been properly selected and maintained, and had the
sophisticated tools been optimally used, these down times could
have been avoided and you wouldn't have been forced to take your
credit cards out and pay the 3 percent surcharge as you shopped
at the "computer city".

A server should also be scalable. It means that we should be
able to expand its capability and capacity as our requirements
increase. Perhaps, we need two or more processors as the number
of users grows. Perhaps we need more storage.

SNI's Primergy

Courtesy of Siemens Nixdorf Informationssyteme (SNI), I had
the chance to take a look at their upper midrange server, the
Primergy 560. Positioned to compete with other application and
database servers, based on one, and up to four, Pentium Pro
processors, it is a new server to be launched here in Jakarta
this week. It was so massive that I needed the help of two other
men to carry it into my living room, which became its testing
place for 10 days. And, at US$18,000 and up, depending on the
configuration, this German-made server is surely the most
expensive computer I have ever had in my tiny little house.

The test unit was equipped with one Pentium Pro 166 MHz
processor, but it is a multiprocessor system. Last year, its
earlier version received a top 10 product award from the
Industrieforum Hannover. If we fill all of the four sockets with
Pentium Pro 200 MHz chips and the system memory slots are filled
to its two-gigabyte (GB) maximum capacity, up to 500 users can be
easily accommodated. This classifies the machine as a
departmental or enterprise server, and definitely not for my
office. Of course, the number of users that can be served
primarily depends on the applications that they run.

For its storage subsystem, Primergy 560 comes with a RAID
system that uses a three-channel Mylex Disk Array Controller. On
this test unit, there were six Fast and Wide SCSI-2 hard disks
for the storing operating system, data and application programs.
Pak Susanto Hartono, an SNI senior engineer, told me two of these
hard disks were mirrored, three had been set in a RAID 5
configuration, while the sixth one was the hot backup hard disk.
I could easily take out and reinsert any one of them without
having to power down the system. The same can also be done to any
of the three power supply modules that are accessible on the
front panel. These components are hot-replaceable and hot-
pluggable.

The server housing is black, and the lockable metal front door
is covered with green plastic plates. While opening the top and
the side wall of the server is not complicated, you have to have
strong hands to lift the heavy sheet metal of which the server
housing is made. A sensor makes it impossible for us to
accidentally power up the server when the top is open. The
motherboard, like most other motherboards in SNI's computers, is
made in SNI's state-of-the-art manufacturing plant in Augsburg,
Germany. The processors sit on two processor boards, each of
which has its own connection to the power supply.

On the Primergy 560 motherboard, I found 16 slots for the 168-
pin DIMM memory modules; it does not use the SIMMs with which we
are already familiar. Meant for use in a departmental or
enterprise capacity, Primergy 560 can be equipped with up to two
GB of RAM. The cost of all this RAM, as you can imagine, could be
several times higher than the cost of the server itself. The main
memory also has an error detection and correction feature, so
that data corruption in the memory can be prevented.

Diagnostics

A server of this caliber is expected to be up and working 24
hours a day and seven days a week. Primergy is equipped with what
SNI calls ServerMan, a set of server management software tools
that can be operated from a management console. The console can
be a 486 machine connected to the server. Among the services it
offers are a Prefailure Detection and Analyzing and a remote
power on or off timer setting. The tools continuously monitor the
condition of vital components, such as the hard disks and the
fans. They also monitor the temperature inside the housing. For
example, when something is wrong with the fan and heat builds up
inside the server, the SNI-developed ServerMan will warn the IT
personnel with the message: "Temperature at sensor 2 in cabinet 0
of server Pima-560 has reached the warning level". If the server
is equipped with a modem, it can also be configured to send out a
message to a preassigned pager number or even to an e-mail
address.

Should a serious failure happen and the system cannot continue
to work, the server will reboot, reconfigure itself and exclude
the offending component from its configuration. This is called
Automatic Server Reconfiguration and Restart.

To increase reliability further, we can add an optional Remote
Test and Diagnostic System on a hard disk that will have to be
installed inside the server. Running either from the server
itself or remotely, the system offers functions such as EISA
configuration utility, BIOS update and Mylex controller
configuration. By the way, the server has three EISA, five PCI
and one shared expansion slots.

Although their presence in Indonesia is still new, I was
informed that SNI has joined a group of 10 top notebook, PC and
server vendors here. Specifically, in the server segment, they
offer four classes of Intel-based servers, namely the Primergy
100, 300, 500 and 700 series. The middle digit, like the six in
560, indicates the processor class. Thus, the Primergy 360 uses
up to two Pentium Pro processors. The Primergy 760 is a scalable
rack system that can also run on up to four Pentium Pro
processors.

It often happens that the leading edge technology found in
today's server will trickle down and be found in tomorrow's
workstation. This makes the German company believe the server
market is, at least, as important as the PC and workstation
markets. Besides, they believe server sales can open up the door
for workstation and PC sales. These are the main reasons behind
SNI's thrust of their server products, which have made quite a
substantial contribution to their overall business. As for
myself, I was just happy to have an opportunity for a little
hands-on to learn what makes a state-of-the-art server so
different from -- and so much more expensive than -- my home PC.