Server ideas

[darmstadt]

Just out of interest, whats the product called and what are the PCI adapters doing?

The original product is called Flex-ES and the PCI adaptors are ESCON cards which connect to a mainframe or other peripherals. I'm using it to emulate tapes, disks, unit record devices and terminals

[bellymonster]

Just out of interest, whats the product called and what are the PCI adapters doing?

[darmstadt]

I have a Sun E450 doing nothing - it's got 4 cpu's and 3gb ram, 20 x 9gb disks on two controllers. Loads of spare PCi slots. Oh and two redundant PSU's.

I'll probably end up giving it away or skipping it, it's not hugely fast plus it sucks power.

If it's gonna be used you can have it.

Thanks for the offer but its a little bit too old and not enought disk capacity. I need something new as it has to sit 24/7 for a minimum of 3 years connected to mainframes. Plus it would first need to be sent to the USA to get hardware certified. I have used a Sun for this before and it as quite impressive but primarily used IBM servers (this is a project born from the NUMA-Q)

[stek]

I have a Sun E450 doing nothing - it's got 4 cpu's and 3gb ram, 20 x 9gb disks on two controllers. Loads of spare PCi slots. Oh and two redundant PSU's.

I'll probably end up giving it away or skipping it, it's not hugely fast plus it sucks power.

If it's gonna be used you can have it.

[darmstadt]

I thought I would throw this one out here...For a few years I supported a product which ran on Intel based servers (running SCO or Redhat or OpenSuse) which uses proprietary cards and hardware and I used specific servers. I'm now starting it up again as a possible 'plan b' and am looking at newer servers to use but things have changed. What I'm looking for is:

- preferably IBM xSeries but will consider either Sun or HP

- rack monuted server preferably but can be tower with a rack conversion kit

- must provide adequate internal disk storage, i.e. more than 6 hard drives but - has the option of adding external storage such as a Jbod or NAS via Fibre channel

- only needs two processors and 2-4gb of memory as it just runs the OS, the software and maybe something like a TSM client

- must provide very good internal cooling

- I'll probably be adding another RAID card to handle disks (RAID-5) and possibly allow the onboard to handle other devices such internal/external tape if I can

- here is the clincher, the proprietary hardware is a PCI card which is 133mhv, 32 bit and 3.3v (but 5v capable) which means that the server must have a minimum of1, preferably 2 slots to tkae these cards which rules out any servers with only PCI-E slots (PCI-X) is okay. Ideally they would also on their own bus as if you put them on say the bus where the RAID controller is then the speed of the other card is the speed of the slowest card on the bus (these are ESCON cards)

Not an easy task I must admit. I've thrown out the x3200 as it ran too hot and the RAID controller threw out too many problems (very slow for a start and one aspect this application is very disk I/O intensive.) Looking at the x3650 but also worried about the cooling although the x3400 looks pretty good. I know that IBM have a system coming out with 48 internal drives shortly but I don't know the rest of the specs yet. So I'm going through the IBM COG and running the Standalone Solutions configuration tool but if anyone has a proposal I'm more than happy to hear it. Cheers.