HP's NetServer LT6000r pushes the server envelope
Hewlett-Packard's NetServer LT6000r enterprise server is full of surprises. It's a six-way machine fitted into a four-way box that packs quite a performance punch. We were impressed with the design and the ease of use of this server.
The unit we tested, which appeared at first to be another four-way, four-rack space server, came with six Pentium III processors and 1G byte of RAM that can be upgraded to 8G bytes. The server's multiprocessor architecture is built on the standard ServerWorks' ServerSet III HE chipset as opposed to Intel's Profusion architecture, which can support up to eight processors. The ServerWorks chipset normally supports four processors, but HP has altered the processor bus layout to fit in six CPUs. HP claims the ServerWorks chipset performs incrementally better than the Intel chipset due to that lack of coherency filters found in the ServerWorks chipset.
This is the first enterprise server we have tested with our new file, network and database tests. Until we test other servers against this new methodology, we have no point of reference. However, in general, the HP NetServer LT6000r server performs very well.
The file results are in line with what we would expect for this class of server. By that, we mean the file test results for this box rang in at three to four times that of the same tests run on a server with two processors.
The processors in this box were not running at 100% utilization during any of the file tests. This implies that there is a bottleneck elsewhere in the server system. Most likely, the bottleneck lies in the bandwidth of the individual drives. The drives were configured in a RAID-0 stripe set using the RAID controller, but the server was shipped with only five drives in the RAID-0 stripe sets. A server with six processors would require more on the order of 20 drives to reveal the full performance of the RAID controller. Therefore, we believe this bottleneck could be alleviated by reconfiguring the RAID set or by adding more drives.
The network tests showed the HP NetServer LT6000r can handle a large number of transactions per second. We saw this server process in excess of 10,000 transactions per second. This heavy load creates stress on the I/O subsystem including the network interface. The CPUs were not pegged during this test, which leads us to believe that the bottleneck is the I/O subsystem as is expected in most servers. In the CPU database tests, the Oracle and SQL Server 7.0 numbers cannot be compared to each other directly because of the different database configurations. Also, the SQL statements were slightly different between Oracle and Microsoft's SQL.
The HP LT6000r also performed extremely well in our new CPU database test. Running SQL Server on Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000, the HP NetServer LT6000r server got a marginally better score than the Dell 8450 loaded with six CPUs we tested earlier this year. With 30 virtual users,
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