September 8, 2004
Coined a sub entry-level server, NEC’s latest budget-priced offering looks to be severely blurring the lines of distinction between servers and workstations. The small business server is prime territory at the moment, and we’ve already seen many other blue-chip vendors such as HP and Dell looking for a piece of the action with their latest low-cost SMB servers. NEC clearly wants in as well, but the question is, how far do you go to reduce costs, and yet still be able to deliver a viable server solution?
The TM700 comes clothed in NEC’s standard mini-tower chassis, which is also used by its NAS (Network Attached Storage) appliances. It looks and feels solidly built, and comes with a pair of 5.25in bays at the front with one occupied by a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive. There’s also a spare 3.5in bay above the floppy drive, but apart from the power button and status LEDs there’s nothing else to report.
The side panel can be padlocked shut but no intrusion detection switches are ?tted. Behind this is a reasonably tidy interior that allows easy access to components for upgrades and maintenance. NEC has always relied on other manufacturers for its low-end server motherboards, and this time round has ?tted an Asus P4C800-E. Strictly speaking this isn’t aimed at server applications – the presence of a full set of audio ports gives the game away, but it does offer a number of useful features. First up is the pair of embedded Serial ATA (SATA) ports, which are accompanied by an integrated Adaptec SATA RAID controller. A pair of 120GB Seagate SATA drives provide plenty of storage, but these were supplied con?gured as a RAID-0 striped array. You don’t lose any capacity with this arrangement, but we would prefer to sacrifice storage for a fault tolerant RAID-1 mirrored array.
The compact motherboard sports a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 processor, and cooling initially looks good. The module is enclosed in a funnel shaped shroud that is spring-loaded and mates with a grill on the side panel to draw air straight in and over the processor. This seems a great idea until you realise that there are no other cooling fans in the chassis, so the hard disks will be running hotter than necessary, which will increase the likelihood of failure. Expansion options are modest as well, as there’s only room for one more hard disk in the cage, although if you plan to do this we would recommend ?tting some extra fans to get some air moving round them. With only two SATA ports on the motherboard you’ll need to ?t another controller, but all have 32-bit/33MHz PCI slots are available.
Network services are handled well by the embedded Intel PRO/1000 Gigabit adaptor, but NEC’s choice for graphics power is total overkill. Sticking an AGP 8X Nvidia Quadro 380 XGL with 64MB of video memory in a server is a waste of money. If you’re running business critical applications then you shouldn’t have your server doubling up as a graphics workstation. In most cases a ‘proper’ server will sit quietly in the background minding its own business with the monitor switched off. As cooling is such an issue in this system it’s also worth noting that the graphics card doesn’t have an integral fan either, so will add to the heat build up.
NEC’s ExpressBuilder CD-ROM could prove useful in the event of a system failure – it provides a simple menu that enables you to rebuild the OS. Just boot the server with it, select the OS you wish to reinstall, choose a boot partition size and leave ExpressBuilder to get on with it. The TM700 is designed to be managed by another system running NEC’s ESMPRO software, so all you get is the agent software which will be of little use if this is the only server in your company. Adaptec’s Storage Manager looks more useful as it provides a smart browser interface with all details of your RAID arrays. You can manage, monitor and create new arrays, and a very useful feature is the ability to tie in disk or RAID controller related problems with email alerting.
For the price, you’re getting a reasonably powerful system from NEC, but we’re concerned about the poor attention to cooling and the lack of server specific functions. Dell’s PowerEdge 700 is more costly, but we would recommend this over the TM700, as it’s a superior choice that has far more potential for the small business.
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