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New servers for small businesses and departments show off ultraspeedy processors and low prices. We pit five cutting-edge servers against a pair of older siblings--the results will surprise you.
Behind every great PC stands a great server--many servers, actually. These silent workhorses fetch our files, run the nitty- gritty applications that keep our businesses in business, and (most conspicuously) host our Web sites.
If there were no servers, there would be no World Wide Web. And in turn, the Web is the main force driving today's huge growth in server sales. Every major PC vendor has piled into this formerly niche market. The result: You can enjoy soaring performance at plummeting prices, and you can get fancy, high-reliability features from affordable workgroup/department servers instead of spending $30,000 on roaring behemoths behind a glass wall.
For this review, we looked at seven of said workgroup servers running Windows NT Server 4.0 (the fastest-growing server operating system), including Acer's AcerAltos 9100, Compaq's ProLiant 1600, Dell's PowerEdge 2300, Gateway's ALR 8200, Hewlett-Packard's NetServer LH3, Micron's NetFrame LV2000, and NEC's Express5800 LS2400. Each server we tested comes with dual Pentium II processors, 128MB of RAM, at least two SCSI hard drives, and a 100-megabits-per- second network card.
These beasts aren't cheap: Prices range from less than $4500 to more than $13,500, though you can buy a rock-bottom server from a major vendor for as little as $3000. For the money, however, they offer an excellent combination of speed, storage, and specialized features such as redundant, "hot-swappable" components (meaning they can be replaced while the server is running). Estimating the maximum number of users a workgroup server can support is hard, since every network or Web site is a unique environment, but in some roles these machines are capable of supporting hundreds of users.
The tests for this roundup were conducted at Centennial Networking Labs, a hardware testing facility near Raleigh that is affiliated with North Carolina State University. For performance testing, we turned to three commercial server benchmarking packages: Bluecurve's Dynameasure File Professional 2.0 and Dynameasure SQL Professional 2.0 test suites, and Mercury Interactive's LoadRunner (see also "("http://www.pcworld.com/current_issue/article/0,1212,7856+8+0,00.ht ml") How We Test"). We evaluated each server on a combination of performance (30 percent), features (30 percent), pricing (30...