Archive for June, 2005

Compaq ProLiant 3000 #3

Wednesday, June 1st, 2005

I bought another ProLiant.  Yes, you could say it is an addiction.  And this one was not the biggest bargain around.  It is a dual 600MHz Rack model with no drives (but the newer LVD drive cage), one power supply and 1.5 GB of RAM.  I looked long and hard at the 5500s (and even some higher end models) but in the end decided to maximize cross-platform compatibility.  True, the drives will not be compatible, and I may end up regretting that choice.  But the über performance of this machine (in the PL3K world) is not to be taken lightly!  Next on the shopping list: SmartArray 5300 RAID controller (Compaq PN 171383-001, for example).  It is the ne plus ultra of PL3K RAID controllers.  In fact, I don’t think it was ever produced while the ProLiant 3000 was a current product, but it is 100% backwards compatible (software driver-wise) with the SmartArray 3200 and 4200.  Details here:

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantstorage/arraycontrollers/smartarray5300/index.html

And some quick specs:

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/10640_na/10640_na_Changes.HTML

UPDATE: The SmartArray 5300 uses a different device driver and device files (cciss) than the earlier Smart Array controllers (ida).  So my earlier claim of backwards compatibility is not true.   We’ll see if this is a good thing or a bad thing later on.

Server Details

Serial Number: D945DDM2K017

Memory: 1572864 Kbytes

System ROM: P9 (08 Nov 2000)

LVD Ultra3/Ultra2 Drive Cage