Guild Companies

Hewlett-Packard this week launched a new four-way, rack-mounted server, using Intel's "Gallatin" Pentium 4 Xeon MP processors, that fits into a 2U form factor. Most four-way machines using Xeon-class processors require two, three, or four times the space, depending on their vintage. These bigger machines, to be fair, also have a lot more expandability, but the new DL560 is going to be a good fit for a lot of customers, in terms of its packaging and performance.

According to my sources at HP, the 2U chassis of the DL560 could have had more electronics jammed into it, but the company discovered that, by leaving some open spaces and rejiggering how air flows into the machine, it could create a four-way server that takes up the same space as a two-way "Prestonia" Xeon DP server and only throws off a little more heat. One of the tricks, say sources, is keeping electronic components, like disk drives, out of the front panels, which means that intake air for cooling that is sucked into the chassis is not preheated by these components before it is pulled over the processors to remove the substantial heat generated by Intel's Xeon processors. A DL380 server, which is a two-way Prestonia box, blows out 1420 BTU of heat per hour with all of its components added in (including two 2.8 GHz processors), and the new DL560 with four Gallatin 2 GHz processors only throws off 1,800 BTU per hour. A four-way DL580 using the same four Gallatin processors (which has a much bigger main memory, a lot more disk storage, and other peripherals) cranks out between 3,000 and 3,600 BTU per hour. The heat output of the DL560 compared to the DL580 is roughly proportional to the maximum power that the two machines can draw from their power supplies when fully loaded. The DL580 has an 800 watt power supply, while the smaller DL560 has a 500 watt supply.

In any event, the DL560 supports the 1.5 GHz/1 MB L3 cache, 1.9 GHz/1 MB, and 2 GHz/3 MB L3 cache versions of the Gallatin processors. On applications that do not require a lot of I/O bandwidth or main memory, the machine will perform very similarly to the DL580. One some workloads--like those for technical computing--the large cache support on the DL560 might allow a rack of these servers to out-perform a rack of DL380s, even though the DL380s have processors running at 2.8 GHz. The machine seems to be aimed at application serving jobs and at database and compute jobs where form factor is an issue.

The DL560 is based on the Broadcom ServerWorks GC-LE chipset, and it supports either 512 MB or 1 GB of base main memory, expandable to 12 GB. When faster Gallatin chips with bigger caches are available from Intel, later this year or early next year, they will work in this machine. The DL560 has only three PCI-X slots and only two disk drive bays (supporting disks with 36 GB, 73 GB, or 146 GB of capacity). The server has an embedded RAID disk controller and two embedded Gigabit Ethernet adapters. A base machine with two processors and 512 MB of memory with no disks will carry a suggested list price of $7,100. A two-way 2 GHz DL560 machine with 1 GB of memory, a 36 GB disk, and redundant power supplies sells for $16,138 on HP's Web site. With the 1.9 GHz chips and the same configuration, the price drops to $11,838, and a DL560 using the 1.5 GHz chip (which has a small L3 cache as well) costs only $7,438 on the Web. A four-way 2 GHz machine with 6 GB of main memory and 36 GB of disk sells for $30,710 on the HP store, and a 12 GB DL560 with the fastest Gallatins and a single 36 GB disk sells for a whopping $61,020. That jump from 6 GB to 12 GB is very costly, since it requires the use of three 4 GB memory cards, which are very pricey right now. Adding the 11 GB of memory from the base model accounts for $33,884 of the total price tag in this loaded DL560.