The new dual-core HP DL585 is the fastest system I've ever tested. The rugged, 132-pound, 4U rack-mounted server was equipped with four AMD 880 Opteron dualcore 2.4GHz CPUs, 2GB of RAM, and a battery-backed embedded Ultra3 Smart Array 5i drive connected to four 36GB, 15,000rpm hard disks (
see Figure 1). The system supports a maximum of 128GB of RAM and uses AMD HyperTransport system technology. It has two 64-bit, 133MHz PCI Extended (PCI-X) slots, six 64-bit 100MHz PCI-X slots, a 1GB dual-port NIC, two USB 2.0 ports, a slimline floppy-disk drive and CD-ROM combination unit, a serial port, and hot-pluggable redundant power supplies.
The...