Content area
Full text
The latest trend in corporate IS is to centralize servers at one location. While this path is taken with good intentions, the approach sometimes proves impractical, as network mangers must make room for bulky servers, disk arrays and monitors.
To provide some relief, administrators are implementing high-density, rack-mount systems. About a year ago, Compaq Computer Corp. began shipping the ProLiant 850R, its first lowprofile, rack-mount server, but it was not well-designed for a rack system. The 850R lacked many of the features-such as sliding rails-that good rackmount servers provide.
Now, Compaq makes up for past mistakes with its ProLiant 1850R, which includes many of the features-such as rails and front-mounted status LEDsmissing from the 850R, while adding performance, scalability and increased fault tolerance. I tested a preproduction 1850R unit at our Northern California corporate lab, which has installed numerous 850Rs. During testing, we successfully installed both Novell IntranetWare and Microsoft NT Server 4.0, along with Microsoft's BackOffice suite.
The server's base price, $3,906, includes a single 400MHz CPU and 128-MB ECC RAM. Our fully loaded unit (256 MB of RAM, three 10,000 RPM drives, one newly released Smart Array 3200ES controller and a single power supply) costs slightly more than $10,000. If you don't need the fault-tolerance features, the 1850R's compact design or the management capabilities of the bundled Insight Manager software, you're better off purchasing a clone PC. Otherwise, the Compaq ProLiant 1850R is an excellent value and will be a key component in any system administrator's network. The 1850R is also Microsoft Cluster-certified and on the Microsoft Hardware Certification list.
SmartStart To assist in the ProLiant 1850R's installation and configuration, Compaq offers its SmartStart utility. During testing, it not only let us easily configure and install our copies of NT 4.0 and IntranetWare, but helped us configure the array controller. In addition, SmartStart created the Compaq system partition and copied the appropriate utilities to the system partition. All of these tasks can be accomplished manually, but SmartStart does it with less hassle and our server was up and running faster as a result.
One of the most significant limitations of the 850R was that it...