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.