Compaq Proliant 8500R from 1999 - (PWJ226)

Another find from our basement.... A Proliant 8500R server from 1999 (2000) with up to 8 CPU's (Pentium 3 Xeon) and HotSwap-PCI, a feature everybody built into their machines but nobody could really use. CORRECTION: The PCI sockets in this machine are 32/64 bit wide, not 16/32 bit as I say (14:15 ...)

[f.k.b.]

I remember "hot swapping" a PCI card on a Pentium 3 or 4-ish Dell workstation.... I was in a hurry and accidentally left the power on when switching a card... I was blown away to see it didn't crash and actually started loading new drivers. 🤓

[jimsvideos]

It's amazing how quickly this goes from being the new hotness to scrap value.

[paulladdie]

I used to run MS Exchange for 2000 users on an eight CPU 700MHz Xeon based system. It cost around £50000 at the time without the external disk cabinet. It was the fastest windows server we had at the company.

[SteveInScotland]

These were beautiful machines and practically indestructible. Very nice to work on, even the boxes they were delivered in had a built in ramp and had reusable seals so you could roll it out in the workshop, configure it. Roll it back and deliver it to the end customer.

[JapanPop]

I helped transition an older Compaq Proliant to one of these back in the day. It cost our department a LOT of money. But it was our RAID array for the entire division😂

[ChipGuy]

4:11 You said these are all 32 bit PCI sockets. What I see in the video are 64 bit 5V PCI sockets. They got the 64 bit extension on them and the notch is for 5V signalling AFAIK.

[andrewmoser]

I grew up with 90s Compaq in the Windows 98 era, and they honestly did some cool stuff with their industrial design and aesthetic. Compaq machines during the Presario era have gentle curves like an air purifier or washing machine, all of their fonts were very faint and in italics, they bundled original content with their computers (like tutorials and unique wall paper/themes)... good stuff...

[faolan]

This brought back some great memories, thanks for showing off this server! I used to work support in the Proliant division at Compaq when this beast was out there, and had one next to my cube that I used to use for Linux kernel compiling across the 8 processors.Those DC converters were called Voltage Regulator Modules (VRMs), and were redundant. One side of the board could have a component fail and the other side would take over without the system going down. I think it was converting to 2 different voltages as well, possibly for the separate cache chip vs processor chip those Xeons had under the cover. That's why it looks like 4 separate sections per VRM board.

That Profusion chipset sitting in the middle of the processors and memory board was a Compaq and Corollary design, solving an issue Intel and HP struggled with since the Pentium Pro. Going above 4 processors with Intel chipsets didn't work, the traffic to manage cache coherency between them would overwhelm the CPU bus of that era. IIRC HP tried to crack the 4 processor limit with a 6 processor Pentium Pro machine that performed poorly around that era. Compaq's key was to split the processor bus in two, and use SRAM cards with their own direct connection on both processor busses to sync cache between them. The Profusion chipset also had 2 memory busses, one bus out to the PCI slots, one smaller I/O one, with a crossbar switch distributing traffic among all the busses. This became the chipset other vendors like Dell licensed to ship their 8 processor machines, though Dell made theirs look cheaper with a dirty trick. Their base model one shipped with smaller SRAM cards, limiting the amount of cache the Pentium 2 and 3 Xeons could use to 512KB, instead of the max of 2MB. That hurt performance a bit unless customers paid more for the pair of 2MB SRAM cards.

Smart Array wise, this was one of the earlier machines to get the newer integrated version meant for servers like this with only a few drives. They became common in the 1U DL360 servers that launched shortly after the 8500R (which got renamed DL760 and upgraded to PCI-X slots IIRC). The Proliant 8000 was also an 8 CPU server built around the Profusion chipset, but with 2 PCI-ES slots and 4th generation Smart Array 4200ES controllers driving 18 internal drives. Those were wild, in that it routed 3 SCSI connections not over cables, but through the PCI-ES slot. It allowed a redundant controller to be on standby ready to take over if the primary failed, with the SCSI cables attached to the motherboard. That era was when customers were switching from a lot of direct attach SCSI drives to fibre channel SANs, and the 8500R was aimed at those on the SAN side.

[villefilho]

Nice trip to the inside of the server! So many stuff to fail, it´s incredible that still work. The PSUs? totally INSANE. Great video!

[andycristea]

I think you mean 32 and 64bit PCI, not 16 and 32. Awesome machine! I'd love to have one. I have two 900mhz xeons in my collection with those same heatsinks. Now I know where they came from. Thank for sharing and I hope you don't scrap it.

[movaxh]

I think the progress in power supplies is most staggering and rarely realized thing. As you said you can have same power in like 1/10 of the volume of these old boys. Maybe even more.

[RBLevin]

I love these videos. Nobody does it better.

[borlibaer]

What a swanky Compaq Monster Server. No wonder why Compaq Proliant was leader in Intel based Server realm that era.
I got the RA4000
& RA8000 HSG80 FC storage arrays and the SP750 Workstation.

[OGParzoval]

Man I retired one of those in the early 2000's at Verizon Wireless, it was hiding out in a old comm's closet. Want to say it was running rhel 5 still if I remember right. It was off, but after a power blip it came up and started service dhcp blowing up a few subnets for a few hours till we found it. Moved it to a lab of old things just for nostalgia.

[dkmillares]

I love Compaq before it was acquired by HP, because it scrapped the brand.

Btw, great video

[Troppa]

Thank you for uploading. I really enjoy to see these old servers. Maybe because thats makes me feel young again when I used to read everything I could get about computers.
As always I've got some more commentaries:

0:16 UNLIMITED POWER!!!! SCNR😅
4:12 64-bit PCI-X 5 volts I would say. PCI was already 32-bit as well as MCA.
6:19 PIII Xeon tops out at 44 W TDP. So together with that fancy heatpipe coolers it would be sufficient cooling.
8:24 These should be dual redundant power modules / VRMs. Probably two phases 5 volts each. Could be 12V but judgeing by the ninth one used for the bus architecture and how little there is in terms of power delivery on the memory board I would guess it has to be 5 volts. I don't think Compaq used the 2.8 V variant of the PIII Xeon. Seems to far off the 3.3 volts needed for the RAM but I might be wrong on this one.
8:41 These are the Corollary Profusion cluster controllers or chipset as Intel would call them (Intel bought Corollary while they were developing these) that make actually two four CPU servers into one eight CPU server via bus bridge magic if I remember correctly. These two chips on the board would be the northbridges [sic!] while the two cards would be the cache accelerators for maintaining cache coherency for all eight processors. There have to be at least two PCI bridge chips and an Intel southbridge somewhere in there.
14:29 It depends. Typically an PCI card could have three rows of connectors as well if it supports 3.3V AND 5V. While the slot would have only 2 rows depending if it's 3.3 or 5 volts. A PCI-X card could have up to four rows of connectors (3.3V AND 5V aupport) while the slot would have only 3 again depending if it supports 3.3 or 5 volts.

[daviddunmore]

installed three of these back in 1999 to replace four P133 desktops (3 running NT 3.5 an 1 with NT4) - quite why a major UK company would still be using obsolete desktops as servers I never did find out.

[thisnthat]

I still have a Proliant 5500 with 4x Pentium Pro 200 CPUs and 2GB RAM. It uses the older "rock lobster" drive trays. There are two Smart Array 2 controllers in it.

[Wreck-Gar]

I still have a Proliant Ml370 from 1999 with Dual 1GHz P3s and the same LCD Control Panel. Great systems 👍

[graz]

Remember having one of these in a room in my house back in the day that I picked up cheap. But my god the amount of electric that thing used at UK electric rates was crazy and ended up trashing it in a skip. The noise and the heat from it was also crazy.