December 20/27, 1999

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1999 Product Of The Year
Four-Way Enterprise Servers

By Alan Zeichick

Products Of The Year:

Broadvision One-To-One CacheFlow's Web-Caching System Red Hat Linux 6.1 Novell Directory Services B Oracle8i Network-Based Procurement Services i2 Technologies' Rhythm Siebel 99 Four-Way Enterprise Servers Extensible Markup Language Hardware Renaissance Most Important Products of the '90s

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ffordable four-way x86 symmetric multiprocessor servers came into their own this year, as demonstrated by models from Hewlett-Packard and IBM. One boasts an amazing array of high-availability, manageability, and scalability features; the other offers outstanding value.

Both of these servers, the HP NetServer LH4 and the IBM Netfinity 5500 M20, are based on Intel's 500-MHz Pentium III Xeon processors. Those chips may seem slow compared with Intel's hottest new 733-MHz Pentium III chips, but the Pentium III Xeon makes up for it with its 2 Mbytes of full-speed (500-MHz) Level 2 cache to enhance the movement of data into and out of the processor, taking a lot of load off the system bus.

With the right chipset, the Pentium III Xeon offers "glueless" four-way symmetric multiprocessing; that is, there's no need for special chips or buses to enable SMP. That makes high-performance x86 servers simpler to build and more affordable than ever. Add to that the chip's onboard management bus and thermal sensors, and you've got a processor designed for enterprise services.

However, an enterprise server needs more than a high-performance processor--or even four of them. Both of these servers provide onboard RAID controllers, and plenty of room for internal storage: Using 18-Gbyte drives, that's 218 Gbytes for the NetServer and 108 Gbytes for the Netfinity. There's lots of memory too: Both systems are able to support up to 4 Gbytes of RAM.

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