If you're in the market for a new file server and a disk array, you might consider a file server with a built-in array. We looked at two: the AST Manhattan P Series 5090 and the Compaq ProLiant 2000 M4200A.
The AST Research ((714) 727-4141) Manhattan is a 90-MHz Pentium EISA/PCI (peripheral component interconnect) bus server that uses the DPT SmartRAID PM3224 PCI controller. The DPT controller has a graphical configuration utility called Storage Manager, which also handles event logging and user notification of error conditions. The AST Manhattan ships with Percepta, a server manager and monitoring utility for Windows NT or NetWare. The status of the disk array can be monitored from Percepta, which uses SNMP traps to hook DPT's Storage Manager. SmartRAID supports RAID 0, 1, and 5, a maximum cache of 64 MB, an
d hot swapping of drives. The AST Manhattan we tested was shipped with five 2-GB Quantum Empire Series 2100S hard drives and a CD-ROM drive. The price of the tested unit is $15,396.
The Compaq Computer ((713) 374-0484) ProLiant has dual Pentium 90-MHz CPUs and an EISA/PCI bus, and it uses the Compaq Smart SCSI Array Controller. Our test unit had five 2.1-GB Conner C2490A drives, which can be accessed from the server's front door, and a CD-ROM drive. The front door has an internal temperature monitor and a keylock for security. Drives are hot-pluggable, and the system supports seven half-height drives for a total of 14.7 GB. The array is configured via SmartStart, Compaq's CD-ROM-based configuration utility. The price of the unit we tested is $24,880 (the Compaq 1024 monitor is priced separately at $369).
We configured the disk system in each file server as a RAID 5 array of three 2-GB drives and installed Windows NT 3.5 on one of the remaining 2-GB drives as a boot drive. We ran
our performance benchmarks
on the file servers to determine how they performed relative to one another.
In the configuration tested, the Compaq ProLiant was consistently faster than the AST Manhattan. Had the ProLiant been tested with the subsystems, it would have ranked approximately sixth in overall performance and about fourth in database performance, but it was composed of three instead of five drives.
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We ran our performance tests on the file servers to determine how they performed relative to one another.
File Servers With RAID
