In summary, the combination of the ProLiant 8500 and its service and support, provide faster implementation, lower total cost of ownership, and lower risk. Compaq offers customers a version of Microsoft Terminal Server with capacity for eight processor servers, vastly increasing its scalability. The ProLiant 8500 shares the processor option kits used with the ProLiant 8000. Part Number 175810-B21 All ProLiant 8500 processor options kits come standard with redundant Power Processor Modules. The ProLiant 8500 Pentium III Xeon model supports one memory expansion board with sixteen DIMM sockets.
Additional memory is added with pairs of the same size DIMMs.
EDO memory is NOT supported in the ProLiant 8500 Pentium III Xeon models. Although the Profusion chipset supports up to 32GB of memory, there is minimal support and scalability for this memory capacity among industry-standard operating systems, and enhanced support will not be available for an extended period. Also, in discussion with customers we have learned that very few server implementations are fully configured with memory. The ProLiant 8000 capacity is ideal for installation of databases inside the server, accessible through redundant internal array controllers. The ProLiant 8500 drive capacity, combined with the integrated array controller, allows RAID 5 configuration of boot drives plus an on-line spare, further increasing server availability.