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HARDWARE
Blazing fast and power-packed, this 4U server could use a muffler
DESPITE BEING ONLY THE second server produced by a 3-year-old company, the Newisys 4300 has the makings of an enterprise-class workhorse, moving the company's nascent server line into the realm of heavier tasks.
Last year we looked at the Newisys 2100, a 1U, single-processor 64-bit Opteron server (infoworld.com/177). The 4300 sports as many as four 2.2GHz Opteron 848 CPUs, 64GB of DDR (Double Date Rate) 333 RAM (pending the availability of 4GB DIMMs), hot-swappable PCI-X slots, an integrated LSI MPT RAID controller, and five hot-swappable SCSI drives in a 4U package.
Following the unpacking and racking ritual, the first thing I noticed about the 4300 was the volume. As soon as I plugged in the power supply, the 4300 simply screamed. I measured the decibel levels at approximately 78 before power-up and at 95 decibels during normal operation. In fact, the noise it generates surpassed the levels generated by the rest of the servers in the lab, which clock in at about 60 decibels ambient. Whereas high noise levels are to be expected in a datacenter of any reasonable size, the 4300 takes this to a new level. Conversing with a technical support representative within earshot of this server would prove difficult, which is an issue when troubleshooting hardware problems. Newisys acknowledges this problem and hopes to release a BIOS update to mitigate it.
To its...