The reliable, robust, business-critical superserver

System Overview
Features and Benefits
Technical Specifications

Apricot reserves the right to alter specifications without prior notice.

The information contained in these specifications was correct at the time of compilation.
Document Revision: SJ4-180496-IP

System Overview

The Apricot Shogun sets a new standard in network super-servers. Powerful, versatile, expandible, upgradeable and, above all, robust and reliable, it will provide the ideal combination of processing power, memory and storage capacity for business-critical departmental applications.

Processing Power

Equally impressive is the Shogun’s performance. For sheer processing power, its 133MHz single Pentium processor or 166MHz dual or quad Penium processors provide exactly the right scale of system for a particular application - and the expansion capacity to meet changing demands. The Shogun’s capacity for data is huge by any standards. Currently provided by a subsystem containing up to twenty 4GB hard disks, it will gain even greater capacity as larger capacity disks become available.

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. Shogun gives you that confidence through its High Availability features. It has an integral, rugged Uninterruptible Power Supply, and the option of a 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 Shogun to continue without interruption in the event of a disk failure. These two High Availability features deliver data integrity to your business critical system.

Systems Management

Operated through a true Windows application, multiple Shogun 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, allowing Shogun to be part of a heterogeneous network.

Industrial Strength Engineering

Drawing on the expertise of the best of Mitsubishi’s mainframe design engineers, Apricot 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. High spin speed disks cause stress on their backplane connectors. Shogun eliminates this by having floating connectors joined by high quality low loss SCSI cable.

Lifetime Warranty

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

Features and Benefits

Pentium Processing Power

The Shogun’s twin processor slots support either single 133MHz or dual Pentium 166MHz processors, giving a capacity of up to four CPUs. Each CPU can have a 1Mb two-way set associative cache. The intelligent 64 bit bus is also designed to give good performance with only one processor installed - in this case arbitration is removed, allowing free access to memory and I/O.

High Performance Bus Expansion

For maximum versatility, there are four PCI slots, for use with the latest high performance peripherals, and six EISA slots which accept the widest possible range of boards for support of legacy systems. The PCI slots are provided across two PCI peer busses for maximum I/O performance.

Expandible Memory

Total memory capacity is 768 MBytes, provided by two memory cards, each with twelve 36 bit SIMM sockets. The memory controller is ECC protected, and supports 128bit memory access.

80GB Hard Disk Array

The Shogun’s massive drive bay can accomodate up to twenty 3.5" drives, giving a capacity of up 80 GBytes, using 4GB drives. The drive bay consists of five modules of four drives each, with each module handled by a fast and wide SCSI interface. 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.

Tamper-Proof Access

All physical access to the Shogun 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 Shogun suitable for siting in both departmental situations as well as in a computer room.

Robust Uninterruptible Power Supply

The fully integrated 850 watt 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, over-specified power supply, over-specified temperature-sensing fans, a floating backplane to absorb disk torsion 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 Shogun 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.

Technical Specifications