Ipex Centra 9200RM Quad Processor Itanium2
On a normal day this system would be the one to get excited over, with four Itanium 2 processors it certainly stands out from the average crowd. Unfortunately for Ipex and Intel, it is not a normal day and the crowd in this review is far from average. The Itanium 2 machine still stands out with an amazing 4U rack mount chassis design that is probably one of the best engineered chassis that has ever come across the test lab threshold.
The front panel of the unit is easily removed to disclose the CPU module, which is roughly the height of a 3U chassis. It opens like a suitcase to reveal two of the processor heatsinks and two of the power pod heatsinks. To the right of these are two banks of four memory slots.
Initially we were surprised when opening this to discover what appeared to be four CPUs but with two different types of heatsinks. Upon reading the accompanying documentation it became apparent that one set of two were the CPUs and the other set were the power pods for those CPUs.
The rear of the unit houses two hot-swappable power supply modules, next to this is the removable expansion module that allows engineers to access the bays without removing the chassis from the rack. There are a total of nine card expansion bays in this chassis, next to these also in the removable module are the ports.
The Itanium 2 CPUs were great performers. The system was supplied running Microsoft Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition (64-bit). The only hassle we had was the incompatibility with some of our 32-bit applications, but for the dedicated tasks that a company would be purchasing such a specialised piece of equipment, this would pose no problems providing they did their homework.
Overall the system performance and chassis design were outstanding. The cost is a little high in our opinion, but you certainly get a machine that rocks.
| Product | Ipex Centra 9200RM Quad Processor Itanium2 |
| Price | From $23,000-$98,000; as tested $56,000 |
| Vendor | Ipex ITG |
| Phone | 03 9242 5000 |
| Web | www.ipex.com.au |
| Interoperability |  ½ |
| You are locked into specific 64-bit applications; also no PS/2 ports is a minor grumble. | |
| Futureproofing |  ½ |
| Performance is excellent, upgrade path is relatively straightforward, redundancy is included. | |
| ROI |  |
| An awful lot of bucks for the bang! | |
| Service |  ½ |
| A range of service contracts available; it would differ from system to system. | |
| Rating |  |
I saw a better Quad Opteron server platform from a manufacturer in Taiwan, looks like a great server, you can visit http://www.genesysrack.com.tw for a look, I hope somebody can supply this chaassis in Sydney.