Owner's Manuals
The WorldMark 4300's documentation is plentiful but not overwhelming. The Quick Hardware Installation guide is a superb, fold-out pamphlet that leads you step-by-step through setting up your server and checking its components. The guide also provides telephone numbers you can call for assistance.
The WorldMark 4300 Deskside User Guide is an excellent reference with well-documented, detailed explanations and diagrams of every task, from installing expansion cards to setting SCSI jumpers. The user guide explains procedures for installing and removing components and describes how to use the SCU and the diagnostic partition. I particularly liked the manual's explanations of the BIOS Setup Utility and SCSI configuration.
The WorldMark 4300 also comes with installation and user guides for each of its accessory components. This documentation covers the NCR color monitor, the Seagate disks, the PCI-to-SCSI host adapter, the SMC network card, the tape drive, NT, the ValuePlus CD-ROM, and even a headset adapter. As a technician, I appreciate NCR's inclusion of these printed manuals. The manuals' product descriptions, diagrams, and detailed technical information let you troubleshoot most system problems and repair or replace all the system's major components.
System Performance
For my performance tests, I used the Lab's standard configuration: a set of client machines on a 100Mbps Ethernet network that simulate a typical workload of multiple users (for details about the test environment, see the sidebar "The Lab's Test Environment"). I used Bluecurve's Dynameasure for File Services 1.5 as the workload engine (for information about this product, see "Dynameasure Enterprise 1.5," September 1997). Combining the Lab's test environment with the Dynameasure software gives me quantitative benchmarks that I can use to compare different systems' hardware and software performance.
I compared the WorldMark 4300 with a brand-name server that has quad 166MHz Pentium processors, 512MB of RAM, four SCSI hard disks, and an Intel EtherExpress Pro/100 Adapter and was running NT 4.0 and SP3. I chose to run Dynameasure's Copy All Bi-directional tests. These tests run, in random order, 16 different transactions that copy compressed data, uncompressed data, binary files, text files, and image files between the server and the clients.
I tested the systems for a range of 40 to 100 simulated users. The Lab's test server performed well and produced a peak throughput of 3.2MBps at about 45 users. However, the WorldMark 4300 far outperformed the standard server. The WorldMark 4300 reached its maximum of 5.4MBps of throughput at 56 users. And its network capacity graph was a straight, linear, upward projection, which indicates that if I had continued to add clients, the system could have supported them. Unfortunately, I could not continue my testing beyond 100 simulated users because of time constraints.
The WorldMark 4300 impressed me. It was easy to configure and use across the network, and its performance was outstanding. The WorldMark 4300 is not another standard SMP server. This system might be just what your business needs.
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