High-powered 1U servers make the grade

Comparing and contrasting

Free IT resource Virtualization Insights from Top Experts - Learn how virtualization gets real! Sponsored by Dell Free IT resource Try Sun servers, workstations and storage products free for 60-days. Sponsored by Sun Microsystems

Although using SATA drives in servers may raise some concerns about reliability, it shouldn't be much of an issue here: the two systems with SATA drives -- MPC and Supermicro -- use Western Digital's RAID Edition drives, which are engineered to run 24x7 and have MTBF (mean time before failure) ratings comparable with those of SCSI drives. With 250GB and 400GB RAID edition drives available and 500GB drives coming soon, the capacity offered by SATA is very attractive -- especially when the 400GB drives are cheaper than 72GB SCSI drives.

I also set up the servers as Web servers using Microsoft IIS and then used RadView's WebLoad to create loads, simulating an increasing number of users until response times dropped off. The number of clients necessary to saturate the servers corresponded fairly closely to processor speed, with the HP server doing almost as well with one processor as the Supermicro offering did with two, possibly indicating that IIS wasn't taking much advantage of multithreading.

The systems are very manageable; all offer iLO (Integrated Lights-Out) management modules, although iLO comes standard only with the HP server. All of the models except the HP offer an optional LCD front panel that shows management information, such as the server's primary IP address. And all except the Supermicro server include management software as well, although HP's is the most comprehensive.

When comparing the prices of the systems, be sure to look at available storage space -- as tested, the Supermicro offers 723GB; the MPC, 250GB; the Gateway, 128GB; the HP, 33GB. The HP's particularly low capacity should be a consideration -- 33GB is fine for running a Web server but not enough if you're looking for a database or file server. Of course, if you're connecting to a SAN, internal drive capacity is not much of an issue -- even 33GB is enough to run Windows or Linux servers. You can add 146GB or 300GB drives to the HP, but this will greatly increase the cost of the system.

You may also want to consider ease of buying: the Gateway, HP, and MPC servers are relatively easy to purchase direct from their respective retailers, but the Supermicro is sold as a white-box system through a number of retailers, so it may take some time to hunt down.

Gateway 9415

The Gateway 9415 is a full-featured 1U server that supports two Xeon 3.8 or EM36T processors, as much as 12GB RAM, and as many as three 300GB Ultra320 drives. It is certified to work with a wide array of operating systems, including Novell, Suse or Red Hat Linux, and NetWare, as well as Windows Server 2003.

The system comes with GSM (Gateway System Manager), a real-time monitoring tool that can send e-mail or SNMP alerts in the event of hardware problems. The test system used one slot for the RAID 5 controller and one for a two-port Gigabit Ethernet board, leaving no slots open.

The integrated controller on the Gateway 9415's motherboard supports only RAID 0 or 1 (mirroring or spanning). One slot can be either full-height PCI-X or 8x PCI-Express, depending on which riser card you use.