SQL Server Magazine

The NetFRAME 9008XP system (NF9008XP), a 4-way clustering server from NetFRAME (which Micron recently acquired), incorporates some interesting features that move the system beyond fault tolerance to what NetFRAME calls high availability, in other words no (or minimal) downtime. NetFRAME attempts to achieve this goal by making the NF9008XP's SCSI hard disks, power supplies, and PCI cards hot-swappable.

The NF9008XP's four 200MHz Pentium Pro processors (each of which has a 1MB Level 2 cache), four 128MB DIMMs, slots for 12 more DIMMs (for a total of 2GB of RAM), eight 9GB hard disks, and eight PCI expansion slots offer network administrators a variety of possible configurations. The system's Maestro and Maestro Recovery Manager (MRM) programs monitor many of the NF9008XP's major internal devices, including cooling fans, temperature sensors, CPUs, PCI bus slots, hard disks, and power supplies, to orchestrate system performance. Maestro and MRM provide status reports on NF9008XP components in an understandable, graphical format, as Screen 1, page 96, shows. Maestro gives device specifics and includes a field that specifies the physical location of each component.

The MRM option lets you remotely monitor and tweak NF9008XP components and even reset the machine. To set up remote access, you cable a dedicated MRM RJ-45 port on the back of the NF9008XP to a small black box. You then connect the box to a modem, or directly to the serial port on a remote machine running Windows NT Workstation 4.0. These alternative methods of remotely accessing the system provide you with identical access and functionality, except that the direct connection is significantly faster.

Opening Up the NF9008XP
The NF9008XP is roughly the size of three full towers side by side, and it has many flaps and folds that open systematically, giving computer mechanics easy access to its internal components. Looking down at the top of an open NF9008XP, you see the eight PCI expansion slots.

Each expansion slot has a light-emitting diode (LED), which signals its power status. Plastic separators between the slots prevent you from touching one card to another during removal and installation and accidentally shorting out the system. Slots 1 and 8 house the QLogic SCSI adapter cards that access the hard disks.

Maestro lets you disable, power down, power up, and restart any of the slots. Removing the adapter cards requires some effort. The screws and small metal bands that make up the cards' locks do not come out easily. This design feature prevents the screw and band from falling into the internals of the machine when you hot-swap a card. But you must work the card around a half-inserted screw and protruding band to get it out. This design needs improvement, but with practice, I could switch a card in just over 2 minutes.

The NF9008XP's PCI bus lets you take advantage of NetFRAME's MultiSpan technology: You can bind two or more NICs to a MultiSpan virtual adapter and bind the virtual adapter to your network's communications protocols (including TCP/IP, NetBEUI, IPX, and SPX). When you use this configuration, one NIC handles incoming network traffic, and the NF9008XP load balances outgoing traffic among the cards in the virtual adapter set. This MultiSpan feature provides fail-safe redundancy for your network adapters and uses the I/O of the redundant, fail-over cards in a set.

When you configure the NF9008XP's PCI bus and adapters, pay attention to the QLogic SCSI adapters' connection to the hard disks. If you create a stripe set rather than two separate buses running mirrored hard disks, attempting to hot-swap either SCSI card will lock up the machine. I encountered this situation in my tests when I removed and reinserted a SCSI adapter: The NF9008XP froze, forcing me to manually reset it.

Fortunately, hot-swapping power supplies does not cause similar problems. With the NF9008XP open, you can easily access the power supplies from the rear of the box. To remove one of the test system's three Cherokee power supplies, I turned a locking screw, unfolded a handle on its side, and simply slid out the unit.

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