Content area
Full text
By John Bass
Hewlett-Packard Co.'s LP2000r packs a lot of power into a 2U space, with six drives and two 933MHz 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.
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 Computer Corp. 6400 with four 700MHz Pentium III Xeon processors, the two-way HP delivers 93 per cent of the Dell's four-way performance, according to our CPU tests. Looking at the results against Windows 2000, the LP2000r delivers 67 per cent of the Dell's performance, which is not bad for a two-processor machine.
Our LP2000r came with two 933MHz Pentium III processors, 1GB of RAM, six 18GB hard drives, two embedded Intel Corp. Pro100+ Ethernet network interface cards and one Intel Pro1000 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 RAIDzero stripe sets for the...