Good, bad and different

Headnote

A monthly feature in which we evaluate file and application servers, based on tests conducted in a lab owned jointly with our sister publication, PC World.

This month, we tackle three enterprise servers and one for the workgroup. The latter, the Aquanta ES from Unisys Corp., turned in the worst performance of all the servers we've tested to date. Its bargain-basement price, however, pushed it into our top five price/performance leaders.

Of the enterprise servers, the Data General Corp. AViiON AV 4900 and ALR Revolution Quad6 turned in very good performance numbers. We'd expect this of the first two servers we've tested based on Intel's Pentium Pro CPO. The AViiON, however, is by far the most expensive machine we've looked at, making it a questionable value when judged by price/performance.

The Panda Project's Archistrat 4S failed to perform up to the standard of the other enterprise servers. However, its unique sleek design, which makes it a bit harder to maintain, may appeal to some sites whose servers are on display instead of locked behind closed doors.

The AVON AV 4900 houses four Pentium Pro processors on two cards in a large tower case. With three hotpluggable power supplies for fault tolerance, there's no room for internal storage.

Drives are provided in an external enclosure called CLARiiON with dual redundant paths (two controllers in the AViiON, two controllers in the CLARiiON, two cables the hot-swappable SCSI drives, which can be configured for RAID3 or RAID5. This high level of redundancy almost guarantees 100% hardware uptime. CLARiiON drives are easy to remove and insert.

Our performance testing on the AViiON turned up mixed results. As a file server and in our Notes tests, the machine lagged all the multiprocessing machines we've seen to date.

However, in the Oracle7 test, the AViiON turned in a strong second place showing, right after the ALR Revolution, indicating its utility as an application server.

Inside the AViiON, CPU and SIMM cards are easily accessible. As configured, the system was not very expandable, but there were already plenty of options installed, including both CLARiiON adapters and an internal modem.

The system has no hardware security features.

Data General bundles NT Alert with the system, a program that watches for problems and...