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Hewlett-Packard's 2U server puts a lot of power into a small package.
Hewlett-Packard's LP2000r packs a lot of power into a 2U space, with six drives and two 933-MHz Pentium III processors. The unit, which began shipping in April, scored high enough in our tests to be a strong contender in the battle at the top of the two-processor rack-optimized server space.
Performance
The LP2000r scored well in our file size, CPU database and network I/O tests. We used new benchmarks with this server, leaving us with no servers to compare with because the older benchmarks were used in previous tests.
However, comparing the Dell 6400 with four 700-MHz Pentium III Xeon processors reviewed last November, the two-way HP delivers 93% of the Dell's four-way performance, according to our CPU tests. Looking at the results against Windows 2000, the LP2000r delivers 67% of the Dell's performance, which is not bad for a two-processor machine.
Features
Our LP2000r came with two 933-- MHz Pentium III processors, IG byte of RAM, six 18G-byte hard drives, an HP NetRAID 2M RAID controller, two embedded Intel Pro100+ Ethernet network interface cards and one Intel Pro 1000 Gigabit Ethernet PCI NIC.
The six hard drives are plugged into two three-slot drive cages. The drive carriers allowed the hard drives to be swapped without a hitch.
The two hard drive cages can be connected to different SCSI controllers or plugged into the same SCSI controller. The one we tested came configured with the two drive cages connected to both ports of the NetRAID RAID controller.
The RAID controller configured the first drive in the left drive cage to be the operating system partition. The remaining five drives were configured into two RAID-zero stripe sets for the data partitions.
The LP2000r has two Symbios SCSI controllers on the motherboard. Neither of the SCSI controllers on the motherboard were used, but one SCSI controller was connected to an external SCSI port on the back of the server. We would have liked to have seen the addition of hot-swap PCI slots and key locks on the chassis.
Availability
The availability features of the server are adequate. The server supports two redundant load-balancing power supplies that can be removed from outside the chassis without...