I am spec?ing three servers and am a little shocked at how hard it is to talk to anyone at IBM who can answer some simple questions. This isn?t a rant about IBM; just the reason for why I come to ask here. Has anyone experience with the x3350 servers? Have you recommendations or comments on the hardware setup?
The primary recommendation I?m getting is ?buy a Dell ?pizza box?? but the x3350 is the chosen box so it?s just to figure out the specific options. The system will be used as a webserver with a twin hosting the database. The software side will be supported in-house so this is just about the hardware. My ideal general specs:
– rack mounted
– redundant storage; 4 hot swap hard drives in RAID5 tolerating loss of one or two at the same time
– redundant power; two hot swap power supplies with hot swap cooling fans
– 4 gig ram 800?s
– 1 dual core xeon
The variable is in the storage as the rest is strait forward.
Option A ? SATA RAID0
Option B ? SATA RAID1
Option C ? SAS RAID0
Option D ? SAS RAID1
Option E ? SAS RAID1e
The chassis has four 2.5? slots so that?s the limit I have to work within.
– My understanding is that RAID0 simply combines multiple disks into a single space rather than providing the ability for one failed drive in the array to be reconstructed. I need to be able to pull a drive, put a clean one in and have the lost drive?s data restored but this seems like a RAID1/RAID5 thing. Is this correct and is this also a feature of RAID1e?
– Will the x3350 provide hotswaping with SATA? The webform does not seem to list hot swap drives with the SATA option selected.
– I?ve seen two drives stripped then mirrored to a third as a backup but that means loosing two drives destroys the install where including a fourth drive also mirrored seems like overkill. Given four slots and possibility of primary and secondary raid arrays, is there a better way to setup the drives?
Any tips or comments are welcome though I?m now reaching out do to needing answers in a shorter time than IBM seems to be able to accommodate.
