ProLiant 6000 with the Pentium II Xeon Processor

When I received the ProLiant 6000, the first thing I wanted to do was see the Xeon processor. To satisfy my curiosity, I removed one of the system's chips. It slid out easily and was soon in my hands.

The first time I saw a Pentium II, processors stopped looking like chips to me and started looking like field replaceable units (FRUs in IBM terminology) from mainframe-class systems. I've spent my share of time in shops with liquid-cooled mainframes, but I never thought I'd see a liquid-cooled PC processor. Compaq ships each Pentium II Xeon processor with what looks like a small radiator, a mechanism that transfers heat away from the chip's primary heat sink. Compaq calls this device the evaporator plate and water-cooled heat pipe. The mechanism lends a lower profile to the system board than the standard heat sink.

Replacing the ProLiant 6000's processor was easy. Compaq's processor-insertion guides make the process almost foolproof.

System Hardware
A ProLiant 6000 with four Pentium II Xeon processors supplies a fair amount of processing power, and the system has the I/O capacity and expansion capabilities to help you harness the processors' power. The ProLiant 6000's standard configuration includes one hot-swappable hard disk cage, but you can add two more cages. Each of the machine's cages can hold up to six 1" hard disks or up to four 1.6" hard disks. These numbers mean that if you configure the system with three cages and fill each cage with 9GB hard disks, you can store 162GB of data in a unit the size of a two-drawer filing cabinet. A couple years ago, I would have wondered what kind of network would ever need that much storage, but if you use online analytical processing (OLAP) databases and support users who rarely delete files, you'll appreciate the option to expand to 162GB. In addition to the hot-swappable hard disk cages, the system has six half-height 5.25" drive bays. One bay holds a 5.25" disk drive, one holds the system's CD-ROM drive, and four are empty.

The ProLiant 6000 has three Ultra Wide SCSI-3 buses that support data rates up to 40MBps. The system I tested includes Compaq's Smart Array 3100ES Controller, a 64-bit PCI card that has extended SCSI connectors that connect to each of the hot-swappable hard disk cages. With these connectors, the system doesn't require SCSI cables to the array controller. This feature makes for a clean installation and eliminates the need to remove cables when you remove the array controller. The ProLiant 6000 has 56MB of onboard, battery-backed, read-write cache that enhances the disk array's performance. The array supports RAID 0 (data striping with no fault tolerance), RAID 1 (mirroring), RAID 0+1 (a mirrored RAID 0 stripe set), RAID 4 (fault tolerance with a dedicated parity drive), and RAID 5 (fault tolerance with parity information spread across all drives). (For more information about RAID, see Joel Sloss, "RAID: Enhanced Disk Storage for Windows NT," August 1997.)

Three PCI buses with a total of ten I/O expansion slots give the ProLiant 6000 plenty of expansion capacity. Bus 1 and bus 2 each hold two 32-bit slots. Bus 3 holds five 64-bit slots, two of which include the extended SCSI connectors. Compaq designed the system's one ISA slot to hold a modem board. The system has a standard set of I/O interfaces. The integrated PCI video controller comes standard with 2MB of memory and supports resolutions up to 1024 * 768 pixels. The standard configuration also includes two serial ports and a parallel port. The keyboard and mouse ports use small PS/2 connectors.

The system supports Error-Correcting Code (ECC) RAM. It uses 60 nanosecond (ns) Enhanced Data Output (EDO) DIMMs up to 256MB each. Eight banks of four DIMMs in matched sets support a total of up to 8GB of memory.

Compaq supplies a Netelligent Dual 10/100 TX PCI UTP Ethernet controller and Compaq Advanced Network Control Utility software. You use the software to configure the Netelligent Ethernet cards; when you use it with a pair of dual-port or single-port Ethernet cards, the utility lets you set up fault-tolerant network connections. The ProLiant 6000 also comes with fault-tolerant power configurations. You can configure the server with as many as three load-balancing, hot-pluggable, redundant power supplies. Depending on your system configuration's power load, you might require two power supplies for system operation and a third power supply for fail-safe redundancy.

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