Does anyone have any experience with IBM's xSeries servers? I am generally a DELL person, but I am looking at a few xSeries 330's for a decent price.

Any experiences with these / IBM support?

Originally posted by DizixCom

Any experiences with these / IBM support?

I have a couple of IBM Netfinity servers and I have been very happy with the support and the performance of the servers. I don't think they can be beat in terms of performance.

We are also a Dell shop, but occasionally all the reps bring us servers to test. The IBM series are pretty decent and look well built. But for the price, you just get more with Dell.

I have found that the hard drives that come with the xseries are...well crappy. I have used 2 servers and have had 2 drives go.

You can get a lot more for your dollar without the IBM sticker on it.

Thanks for the info folks,

For now I think I'll stick with PowerEdge 1650's and 350's for lower end stuff and re-evaluate in the future.

Originally posted by DizixCom
Does anyone have any experience with IBM's xSeries servers? I am generally a DELL person, but I am looking at a few xSeries 330's for a decent price.

Any experiences with these / IBM support?

I picked up a 800MHz x330 refurbished for $450 on ubid.com (without disk drives). They are a solid well-designed box. Dual CPU, Ultra160 SCSI. Each CPU has two fans dedicated to it, in case one fails. Each of the two disk drives has two fans as well. Power supply has two fans. Yes, there are 8 fans in the box. Construction was excellent. Components and their configurations were nicely documented on the inside of the cover.

The box loaded up and is running FreeBSD 4.5 without a problem. IBM supplies system drivers for Windows and RH Linux.

The box has another CPU (aside from the two mentioned previously) that is used solely for system monitoring and diagnostics. There is a display inside the box that shows you the results of the diagnostic tests that are performed at power-on and during running.

The downside: if you want to plug a keyboard/mouse/monitor directly into the box, you need to buy an adapter cable. The x330 series is designed to live in a rack full of x330 boxen. They all daisy-chain together to share one keyboard/mouse/monitor, and you select which server has control of them by pushing a button on the front of the server. Very, very nice if you have a rack of x330's. So-so if you only have one. This wasn't a great concern for me because I config'd FreeBSD to send its console out the serial port. The x330 does not send the POST messages out the serial port.

I've not used IBM support recently, but in the past it has always been one of the best. YMMV, keeping in mind that IBM's enterprise-level support is very different (and much better) than their consumer PC support.