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Apricot FT4200
Enterprise server -- the next generation

Features

System Overview

Features & Benefits

Technical Specifications

Features
  • Up to four Pentium® Pro processors
  • Up to 2GB ECC Protected Memory
  • Six PCI Slots plus three EISA Slots
  • Dual PCI Peer Bus Architecture
  • Twenty 3.5" Hard Disk Drive Bays
  • High Performance RAID Subsystem
  • Ultra-Wide SCSI & Fast SCSI-II On-board Controllers
  • Hot Plug N+1 Redundant Power Supply
  • Integral UPS
  • Full Systems Management
  • Lifetime(TM) Warranty
  • UK Built

System Overview
The Apricot FT4200 is the next generation of Enterprise servers from the company that introduced the concept. Powerful, scaleable, expandable and offering proven reliability, the FT4200 provides the ideal balance of useable processing power, memory capacity and industry-leading storage capacity for demanding business critical applications.

Processing Power
Processing power is the essence of the FT4200. The system board, designed and built by Mitsubishi Electric houses single, dual or quad Pentium® Pro processors to give power which scales to fit the needs of any application, and the expansion capability to grow with the demands of today's resource hungry software. To translate all this processing power into Real World performance, the FT4200 has dual "Peer Bus" PCI expansion for peak system throughput, coupled with a massive 20-disk Ultra-Wide SCSI storage subsystem to balance performance in all key areas.

High Availability
The primary requirement for a business-critical server is complete data integrity. You must have complete confidence in the data that underpins your business. The FT4200 gives you that confidence through its High Availability features. As standard it has an integral, rugged Uninterruptible Power Supply, the option of an N+1 redundant, hot plug, load balancing power supply and the option of an Ultra-Wide SCSI RAID Subsystem.

The UPS protects the system against not just power failures, but also smoothes out the supply, cleaning up any spikes or temporary dips in the mains. Clean power is vital to ensure that all of the components operate at their optimum reliability.

The RAID subsystem is a high-performance three channel controller operating on the fast PCI bus. This splits the data over multiple disks and with the use of data redundancy techniques built into the onboard processor, and a 'hot spare' allows the FT4200 to continue without interruption in the event of a disk failure. These High Availability features deliver data integrity to your business critical system.

Systems Management
Operated through a true Windows application, multiple FT4200 systems can be controlled from a remote location. Security is maintained by password, dialback and data encryption.

Systems Management maintains statistics of all recovered errors, and if a user defined threshold is exceeded, sends an alert. This allows timely fault identification and resolution. In effect a degraded component can be replaced before it becomes a problem, enabling a strategy of preventative and deferred maintenance to be put in place.

Management information is available via SNMP and supports MIB1 and MIB2 browsers, allowing the FT4200 to be part of a heterogeneous network.

Industrial Strength Engineering
Drawing on the expertise of the best of Mitsubishi's mainframe design engineers, the FT4200 has solved many of the industry issues seen in PC servers. Bus bars are used for power distribution to ensure that components operate at their optimum level, ensuring high reliability.

Hot swap disks can only be removed in two stages, disconnecting power and signal separately. This avoids spikes on the data lines which can cause data corruption, and ensures that data integrity is preserved.

Lifetime Warranty
It's this attention to detail that means the FT4200 is quite simply the best engineered PC server around. And with a lifetime warranty, the FT4200 is the natural choice for your business critical applications.

Computers for a Connected World
The Apricot FT series is designed for a connected world. Multiple connectivity options ensure that the business advantages of Internet, Intranet and Extranet technologies can be fully exploited, allowing greater productivity and communications regardless of the size of your organisation. With integrated ethernet, high-speed modem and ISDN options all optimised to give simple, but effective connectivity to your local area network, or even further afield to the World Wide Web, the electronic network that spans the globe.

Features & Benefits
Pentium® Pro Processing Power
The FT4200 has two processor sockets on the system board, with an expansion board for two further processors, giving a capacity of up to four processors. Powerful 200MHz Pentium® Pro processors are used, each with 512KB of level 2 cache to deliver exceptional performance.

High Performance Expansion Bus Architecture
For maximum system throughput, the FT4200 uses two PCI expansion buses running in parallel - "Peer Bus" Architecture. There are five PCI slots and three EISA slots plus one shared slot, and the video controllers and integrated SCSI controllers are all PCI devices. In addition, there is an on-board PCI Ultra SCSI controller and a PCI Fast SCSI-II controller.

Expandable Memory
The FT4200 can address a total memory capacity of up to 2GB (this requires 256MB DIMMs), using ECC DIMM memory modules for high performance and error correction. Memory access is 64bit wide, and all memory is housed directly on the main system board.

180GB Hard Disk Array
The FT4200's massive drive bay can accomodate up to twenty 3.5" drives, giving a capacity of up to 180GBytes, using 9GB drives. The drive bay consists of five modules of four drives each, with each module handled by a separate Ultra-Wide SCSI channel. The architecture is designed to offer RAID high performance and fault tolerance via the DPT PCI RAID controller, ensuring data integrity. The drives are very high reliability, giving 1,000,000 hours MTBF.

N+1 Redundant Power Supply
The FT4200 optional redundant power supply consists of up to 4 hot plug modules, each supplying 300W. Three modules are enough to power even the most demanding configuration, which means an extra module can be added for resilience against failure. And because the power modules are hot swappable, a faulty unit can be replaced quickly and easily with no interruption to service. The FT4200 power supply is fully instrumented, giving it full visibility under the Apricot SMA management suite.

Tamper-Proof Access
All physical access to the FT4200 requires keys and infrared control. This prevents unauthorised access to exchangeables, fixed disks and other system components. Even the front panel buttons can be disabled, preventing accidental switch off. This makes the FT4200 suitable for siting in both departmental situations as well as in a computer room.

Robust Uninterruptible Power Supply
The fully integrated 850watt UPS with replaceable battery pack has comprehensive mains conditioning for protection against spikes and surges, as well as providing a long battery life to allow a controlled shutdown of the system in the event of a mains failure. The UPS also provides standby power for the Systems Management Controller allowing the system to be interrogated even in the event of mains power failure.

Industrial Strength Engineering
A solid metal chassis contains a host of features designed to ensure absolute reliability: bus bars for full voltage power distribution, extra capacity power supply, temperature-sensing fans, and a unique two-stage disk removal process which maintains data integrity by eliminating spikes from the data lines.

All of these, and more, show an attention to detail, ensuring the quality, reliability and robustness have been engineered into the FT4200 from the outset.

Sophisticated Systems Management
A fully-integrated Systems Management Controller (SMC) operates independently of the main CPUs. It receives standby power from the UPS and so can still function when the mains power has failed. The SMC provides system status monitoring, tamper-proof access control and many other features. Its main function is to provide statistical information on recovered errors, allowing any potentially degraded component to be replaced before it becomes a problem, ensuring maximum service availability. The user interface to the SMC is via the System Management Application: a Windows front end application which can be accessed securely through a serial modem interface and over a local area network.

The Intel inside logo and Pentium are registered trademarks and MMX is a trademark of Intel Corporation.

  

 

Computing for a Connected World