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Thanks to decades of TV commercials, we all know what happens when you mix chocolate and peanut butter. One of the hottest categories in the automotive market today are small sport utility vehicles that look like trucks, but are built on a standard car chassis. And eager to jump onto the "Internet appliance" bandwagon, big companies are adapting general-purpose server hardware with custom software to build massive single-purpose server appliances.
We recently reviewed one such offering, Compaq's TaskSmart N2400 (www.internetweek.com/reviews00/rev112700-4.htm). Now it's IBM's turn. The company provided us with a preproduction eServer xSeries 150 appliance, which is built on an off-the-shelf server and a modified version of Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system. The Compaq solution is more scalable, but the IBM entry stands out in its more advanced remote-administration capabilities. Although neither IBM nor Compaq succeeds in hiding the complexity of the underlying operating system and application stack-which one would argue is de rigueur for a true server appliance-IBM definitely makes the setup and management of its appliance a little easier.
The IBM xSeries 150 is built on the Netfinity 5100 server (now renamed the xSeries 230). It's a dual-processor Pentium III server with three half-height and six hot-swap drive bays, dual hot- swappable power supplies (with room to add a third power supply) and cooling, and an onboard management processor. The server appliance is available as both a tower and 5U-high rack-mounted system. The model we reviewed, IBM part code 8658-3XY, was the rack version, with two 800-MHz processors and 1-GB RAM (expandable to 2 GB). We were impressed with the server's exceptionally straightforward tool-less maintenance; this would be an easy hardware platform to repair or expand.
The shared disks in the xSeries 150 server are driven by the IBM ServeRAID-4H four-channel Ultra160 SCSI RAID card, which sits in one of the 64-bit, 66-MHz PCI slots. One channel of that RAID adapter is used internally to feed the six drive bays; the other three can be used for external 14-drive storage arrays. Our review server was equipped with six 36.4-GB hard drives, for a total of 218 GB of raw storage. However, as the server is configured with RAID-5 and with two disk volumes reserved for the...