AMD Opteron Coverage - Part 3: The First Servers Arrive

Einux - Similar, but Different

If you haven't heard of Einux before, one reason to know them is that they are one of ASUS' launch partners for their nForce3 Pro 150 motherboard. Einux also happens to be one of the three manufacturers that provided us with a 1U server for this solutions overview/roundup.

Einux provided us with a member of their Excelera64 line of Opteron servers, the A1740. From the outside you can already see some differences between the A1740 and Appro's 1100H, mainly in that the Einux system features four removable hard drive bays in addition to CD-ROM and Floppy drives.

We mentioned before that the Einux solution was more of a HPC computing platform rather than a server, despite the classification of the A1740 as an Enterprise level server. The reason for us treating the A1740 as more of a HPC solution is because it lacks the manageability features that all truly enterprise-class servers should have. With the Athlon MP, we could let a lack of manageability features slide but if the Opteron is to be taken seriously we need to see some serious manageability options from vendors. Later in this article we'll give you an idea of exactly what we're talking about; for now just keep in mind that even though the A1740 can be used as an enterprise server, from a feature standpoint it is more like the Appro 1100H with hot-swappable drive bays. Einux does list support for their ServerController management technology on all of their servers, however nothing of that sort was provided with our evaluation sample.