The Little HP Server That Can

Unique to HP's product is Hot-Plug RAID Memory. The standard server ships with 5 GB of ECC SDRAM, but only 4 GB are available to the OS. The fifth module is a hot-swap spare that takes over if any other RAM modules fail or produce errors. Rather than use a mirrored RAM configuration, Hot-Plug RAID requires a mere 25 percent increase in memory.

If the server is running Linux or the upcoming Windows 2003 Server, memory can be hot-added to a running system. If you are upgrading from the standard 5 GB to the maximum 64 GB, you must remove a memory bank, replace or add DIMM modules on that bank, and reinstall the bank. The OS will allocate the additional memory.

The DL740 has six available 64-bit, 100-MHz hot-pluggable PCI-X slots spread over three buses, which ensures that slower cards don't bring down the entire bus and high-bandwidth cards--Fibre Channel or additional Gigabit Ethernet cards--get the capacity they need.

RAID Control

For storage, the DL740 features a four-drive, internal hot-swap Ultra3 SCSI drive cage. The server I tested came with four 36.4-GB 15,000 RPM SCSI drives, but the maximum internal capacity is 587.2 GB, using 146.8-GB drives. The DL740 comes standard with the 5i RAID controller with 32 MB of cache embedded on the main board; my test unit came with HP's optional 5312 RAID controller, which sports 128 MB of cache memory and two external connectors. I tested both controllers with Intel's IOmeter. The 5312 controller's performance was about 18 percent higher than that of the 5i, primarily because of the additional cache. However, both RAID controllers exhibited good performance.For network connectivity, the DL740 has two embedded PCI-X gigabit Broadcom NICs. And for maintenance, the entire server is designed for toolless repair. The power supplies, positioned on the front of the server, can be removed by lifting a latch and pulling the handle. The DVD drive resides in a hot-pluggable media bay.

The unit is divided into two sections: the host module and the power and media module. The host module comprises the system board, processors and memory. The power and media unit holds the SCSI drive bay, the DVD drive bay and power supplies. HP will overnight an entire module if a major component fails.

The DL740's SmartStart let me configure and install Windows 2000 Datacenter rather than a standard Windows install, ensuring that device drivers and other system software were consistent across all the HP servers in my setup.

You can access the administrative interface, the Integrated Lights Out (iLO) module, remotely using a Java-enabled Web browser. The standard iLO allows for a text console, giving the administrator access to initial boot sequences and a text console into the OS. The advanced iLO adds a graphical remote console and virtual floppy. Both worked as advertised.With an eye toward server consolidation, HP has developed the optional ProLiant Essentials Workload Management Pack, designed to harness and manage the server resources. The main component of the Workload Pack is the Resource Partitioning Manager, which lets administrators allocate the number of processors and amount of memory a process or application can use.

I created a partition for Internet Information Server (IIS) and allocated four of the 16 virtual processors to IIS, then hit the server with traffic from the lab's Spirent Communications WebAvalanche stress-testing appliance. As the HTTP traffic sent to the server steadily increased, CPU utilization also increased across the four processors, as well as on the one processor handling the operation of the Resource Manager. The remaining 11 processors were unaffected and available for other jobs.

Michael Brandenburg has been an application developer, network administrator and IT manager. Write to him at [email protected].

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