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Price isn't everything, especially if that too-good-to-be-true deal you got a year ago on a workgroup server crashes at least once a day.
With this in mind, we focused our review of workgroup servers on more important factors, like network citizenship issues such as ease of installation on the network, management tools and remote management features. These issues are important in an environment where there is no IS staff close at hand on a 24-hour basis or where technical expertise is limited.
The Players
We requested dual-processor tower boxes from Dell, Gateway and Micron. The units had to have 256 megabytes of RAM, a RAID-5 disk configuration, dual NICs and all the management software that would normally ship with the product. Dell sent us its PowerEdge 2300; Gateway offered up its ALR 8200NTS; and Micron submitted its NetFrame 3100. All the systems came with dual 450-MHz Pentium III processors, so we were able to run WinTune 98 to get a rough comparison of their relative performance.
Gateway ALR 8200NTS
When we speced out a tower case to Gateway, the company took us literally and delivered its ALR 8200NTS in a case that just fit under our desk. The front of the case is dissected into two segments, with a pair of lockable doors separating the expansion bays, CD-ROM and 3.5-inch floppy disk drives on top from the disk drives below. Even though this packaging is quite a tall drink, it's slim, measuring less than 8 inches wide. The side panel of the case is easily removed by loosening two thumbscrews, which reveals a clean arrangement of core internals.
Our ALR 8200NTS arrived with dual Pentium III Xeon 450-MHz processors, two ECC 128-megabyte SDRAM DIMMs for a total of 256 megabytes, four uninstalled Seagate Technology 4.5-gigabyte hard drives and an Adaptec single-channel PCI Ultra2 SCSI RAID controller with two 68-pin connectors. We found five PCI slots; one shared PCI/RAID slot and one shared PCI/ISA slot; and a Telepath 56-Kbps voice-fax-data modem, all cooled by three robust fans.
Gateway crates its hard drives separately as a matter of course, which helps prevent damage during shipping. Installing the drives was simple because they were alphabetically keyed to their bays.
For additional network connectivity, the ALR 8200NTS had...