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| 1. What is one of the
biggest features of the SR103 over other products in the server
market? |
| It was not designed by multiple companies lacking a
common focus. The SR103 was designed by Gigabyte for ultra high
density, rackmount environments. The goal - eliminate the technical
obstacles that arise when using assemblies designed and manufactured
by multiple manufacturers who lack a common focus and direction.
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| 2. What base technology
does Gigabyte bring to the SR103? |
| First Gigabyte is one of 3 motherboard manufacturers
world wide who have the design and manufacturing facilities plus the
experience of shipping over a 1 million motherboards a month. These
are motherboards are executing virtually every operating system
designed to run on an Intel based platform. Gigabyte then designed
an efficient environment to put the motherboard into, an environment
based exclusively on a rack optimized 1U chassis design. |
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| 3. Why do you call the
SR103 a server platform? |
| A server platform is a product, made up with what we
classify as non-commodity components such as motherboard, chassis,
power supply, signal and power distribution systems with an
efficient cooling system. It is that stable platform that you add
your commodity products such as processor(s), memory, disk drive(s),
OS and application software. |
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| 4. What chipset is Gigabyte
using in the SR104 and why? |
| We selected the VIA Apollo Pro chipset because it
supports a 133MHz FSB bus for increased bandwidth, a high speed
133MHz memory bus with their Virtual Channel Ram that uses
registered SDRAM ECC DIMM or VC133 DRAM for superior memory
performance, flexible memory configurations at minimal cost. These
advanced memory technologies provide the bandwidth and performance
necessary for even the most demanding of applications. |
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| 5. What options are
available for the SR103? |
| We have one option, Rackslides. |
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| 6 .What operating
systems does the SR103 support? |
| The SR103 supports Windows NT, Windows 2000, Linux
(RED HAT 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, SuSE 7.1,7.2) & Netware 5.1. |
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| 7. Do you sell your
products to companies that would OEM or private label your server
platforms? |
| Yes. We sell our products to the channel, OEM’s and
companies that private label products. We have product and support
programs that match the unique market needs of each class of
customer. |
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| 8. Is the SR103
Microsoft certified? |
| Yes. You can find the SR103 listed on Microsoft
Hardware Certification List web site located at
http://www.microsoft.com/hwtest/hcl. |
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| 9. What type of drives
can we put into the SR103 drive bays? |
| The drive bays are designed to handle any 1 inch
high ULTRA 66/100 disk drives. |
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| 10. Does the SR103
have an integrated RAID function? |
| Yes. The SR103 has an integrated RAID 0 & 1
controller chipset that is manufactured by Promise Technology Inc.
The Chip set support RAID 0 - disk stripping - for increased disk
performance and RAID 1 - disk mirroring - for drive fault tolerance.
To enhance the RAID 1 function, the SR103 also has supports hot
swappable drives. Should one of the drives fail in a RAID 1 mode, it
allows the failed drive to be replaced without taking the system
down. |
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| 11. What benefits are
provided by having an integrated RAID controller? |
The integrated RAID function offers the following
benefits:
a. With RAID 0, you can increase the performance of your hard
drives by splitting the movement of data equally
between the drives.
b. With RAID 1, you get an extra level of protection from hard
drive failure. With this feature, if a drive fails, the
system will continue operating on the surviving drive.
c. It saves you a PCI slot. |
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| 12. How does RAID
recovery work under condition of a failed hard drive
|
There are two levels of recovery that can take
place. They are:
a. First is at the RAID BIOS level. The BIOS program allows
users to copy the complete hard drive image from one
to the other.
b. The other recovery is done after the system boot-up, where
the RAID utility program will automatically rebuild
data on the replaced drive. |
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| 13. What operating
systems does the Promise RAID chipset support |
| At the present time it supports Windows NT & 2000
and Linux, Red Hat 7.0 & 7.2. This list will be updated frequently,
contact us if you are using a different operating system or a
version of Linux that is different from that used by Red Hat 7.2. |
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| 14. The SR103 has 3
drive bays, but RAID 0 & 1 by definition use only 2 drive bays. Can
you tell me how the 3 drive bays function? |
| Two of the drive bays are multifunction drive bays.
They are multifunction in that they can be connected to either the
on-board RAID controller or the on-board ATA100 controller. When
they are connected to the RAID controller, they are hot swap drive
bays. When connected to the on board ATA100 controller they are
simply removable drive bays. The third drive bay (looking at the
front of the SR103, the left hand drive bay) is connected to the
on-board ATA100 controller and is simply a removable drive bay. |
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| 15. I heard of RAID
1 configurations being used for backup applications. Can you explain
how that is done? |
| When the RAID controller is configured for RAID 1,
each drive is a mirror of the other. By design if you remove one of
the drives the system stays running and also by design, if you
replace the drive you just removed with a different drive, the RAID
controller will rebuild the new drive to match the drive that you
did not remove. With this understanding, if you take the drive that
you remove, lets say every night and store it off site, then you
will have a off site backup of your data that was valid as of the
time you removed the drive. If you have say 5 extra drives, you will
now have rotating sets of data to protect your companies most
important asset, its data. This form of backup is and it happens as
your data is being recorded. |
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| 16. What is the
difference between removable and hot swap drive bays?
|
| Hot swap drive bays have logic attached to them that
allows them to be removed without diSRupting the operating that is
running on the server. This gives you the functionality of removing
and inserting a drive without taking the server operating system
down. There are other limitations that have to be taken into
consideration with hot swap drives. In the case of the SR103, any
one of 2 hot swappable drives can be removed and inserted when the
RAID controller is configured for RAID 1. This can occur because
RAID 1 by definition is mirroring and mirroring is duplicating data
on two drives. Now do not take one drive out, put in back in and
remove the second drive before the data on the 2 drives can be made
equal. If remove the other drive before the data on the last
inserted drive equals that of the original drive, you will crash
your system. If you have the RAID controller configured for RAID 0,
RAID 0 by definition is the taking your data and splitting it
equally between two drives. RAID 0 was defined for performance not
data fault tolerance. So if you remove one of the drives if the RAID
controller is configured for RAID 0, you system will crash.
Removable drives do not give you hot swap functionality. Removable
means that the drives can be removed from the server without having
to take the server apart. Removable drives are typically used in
secured government environments and in environments where you have
to minimize down time. |
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| 17. Can you give me
an example of how I could use the 2 types of SR103 drive bays?
|
| The first application would be using it as a network
password server. In this application you have the RAID controller
configured for RAID 1 operation. When doing your initial
configuration, you would configure the RAID 1 drive set to store
your password keys and the third drive to contain the operating
system. This way one of the RAID 1 configured drives fail, the
system will execute off of the remaining drive. Then you simply
replace the failed drive and the RAID function will rebuild the
replaced drive so that it equals the contents of the surviving
drive. Next application is a database application. Here your primary
concern is performance. In this application you would configure the
RAID controller for RAID, which splits the data evenly between the 2
drives. This configuration will give you performance figures that
exceed single drive performance figures. Like in the previous
applications, the data would be on the drives attached to the
operating system and removable drive would contain your operating
system. |
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| 18. What are the
benefits of having hot swappable drive bays? Is there any
performance delay? |
| The effort of changing a defective hard drive has
been reduced to a simple pull out action without having to open the
chassis. While the system is rebuilding the new drive, the operating
system and applications continue running. The network clients should
not see any differences cause by the drive rebuild operation. |
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| 19. If I am using an
operating system different then that supported by the Promise RAID
Chipset, is there a way that I can by pass the Promise RAID chipset
and connect directly to the drive bays? |
| Yes. By re-arranging the ATA cables inside the
SR103 you can by pass the Promise RAID chip set and connect the
drive bays directly to the on board ATA 100 drive ports. By doing
this you will no longer have hot swap capability because this
functionality is built into the Promise Chip set and associated RAID
software. |
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| 20. What Processors
does the SR103 support? |
| The SR103 supports Intel Pentium III processors
with speeds up to 1GHz. |
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| 21. Does the SR103
support dual processor configurations? |
| Yes. An added feature of the SR103 is that you can
start with a single processor configuration and as your server
requirements grow, you can add a second processor later. |
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| 22. What memory does
the SR103 use? |
| Up to 2 GB of PC133 ECC SDRAM memory. |
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| 23. How do I expand
the SR103 memory? |
| Maximum memory configuration is attained by
installing four 1024MB 133MHz registered ECC SDRAM DIMMs (one in
each DIMM socket). Memory can be expanded 1 DIMM module at a time. |
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| 24. What are some of
the benefits of having a built in dual NIC controller? |
- Extra PCI slots - having dual embedded NIC cards does not
consume PCI slots. In a 1U rack optimized package, the SR103 can
be applied to applications not available to other manufacturers.
- Fail over - the dual NIC is able to work like a single NIC
card. If one should fail, the other takes over with users not
experiencing any difference in network performance.
- Load balancing - as mentioned above the dual NIC work like
one, each sharing the network traffic, effectively doubling the
sever I/O bandwidth, resulting in better network performance.
- Firewall- the dual NIC configuration has the capability to
provide firewall function by using one NIC port for outside
Internet and the other for your internal network.
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| 25. Does the SR103
contain any internal monitoring and reporting functions? |
| Yes. The SR103 has an ACPI (Advanced Configuration
& Power Interface) function built into the motherboard. Some of the
functions monitored by the ACPI function monitors are the presence
of a second CPU, fan speed & temperature for each CPU, system
temperature & Voltages. If the installed operating system supports
the ACPI function, as Windows does, the operating can perform tasks
like automatically power itself off if the CPU temperature exceeds
pre-selected limits. |
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