First apologies being expert at PCs but novice at servers.
I just bought 2 DL380 310587-001 dual 3.06/512 Xeon 2gb memory servers with the following hard drives: (1) 72gb u320, (3) 36gb u320, (1) 18gb u2, and (1) 18gb u3 and am trying to determine what my options are for getting both servers up and running. (My application is raw number crunching, CPU intensive, and will be using these servers as PCs w/XP PRO installed. Why these servers? Because they offer the biggest bang for the buck - I'm training neural networks and need a room full of PC's for training and backtesting(!) )
My first question is the Duplex/Simplex choice. From what I have read, Duplex results in a Raid 1 mirror of HD slots 0,1 and a Raid 5 of slots 2,3,4,5. I have read this is the ONLY configuration. But I have questions:
1) Is R5 possible for any 3 or the 4 HD slots 2-5?
2) Is R0 (no raid) possible on either or both Channels?
Regarding Simplex:
This means all 6 HD slots are on this single channel. So my questions:
1) Is any RAID possible? 0, 1, 5? on this array?
______________________________________
Since redundancy is not important, RAID 0 would utilize all my HD capacity.
Since I have these slower 18gb drives, DUPLEX would allow me to not mix SCSI types, e.g. I would run a u2/u320 and u3/u320 Ch2/1 on the two DL380's. Have I got that right?
_______________________________
The other thing I was contemplating was getting Xeon cpu's with either the 1 or 2mb L3 cache since it is said they dramatically improve performance. It appears that I should be able to upgrade the cpus in this regard. Should I be concerned about any issues?
_______________________________
Since I will have empty bays with the limited number of hard drives, do I have to run the "blank caddies?" I have 2 of them but am 4 short. Are they necessary for any kind of SCSI termination or are they required to maintain the proper cooling flow through the existing hard drives? (My guess is flow but I could be very wrong.)
____________________________
Any help would be greatly appreciated and of course,
Thanks in advance,
Tom
I just bought 2 DL380 310587-001 dual 3.06/512 Xeon 2gb memory servers with the following hard drives: (1) 72gb u320, (3) 36gb u320, (1) 18gb u2, and (1) 18gb u3 and am trying to determine what my options are for getting both servers up and running. (My application is raw number crunching, CPU intensive, and will be using these servers as PCs w/XP PRO installed. Why these servers? Because they offer the biggest bang for the buck - I'm training neural networks and need a room full of PC's for training and backtesting(!) )
My first question is the Duplex/Simplex choice. From what I have read, Duplex results in a Raid 1 mirror of HD slots 0,1 and a Raid 5 of slots 2,3,4,5. I have read this is the ONLY configuration. But I have questions:
1) Is R5 possible for any 3 or the 4 HD slots 2-5?
2) Is R0 (no raid) possible on either or both Channels?
Regarding Simplex:
This means all 6 HD slots are on this single channel. So my questions:
1) Is any RAID possible? 0, 1, 5? on this array?
______________________________________
Since redundancy is not important, RAID 0 would utilize all my HD capacity.
Since I have these slower 18gb drives, DUPLEX would allow me to not mix SCSI types, e.g. I would run a u2/u320 and u3/u320 Ch2/1 on the two DL380's. Have I got that right?
_______________________________
The other thing I was contemplating was getting Xeon cpu's with either the 1 or 2mb L3 cache since it is said they dramatically improve performance. It appears that I should be able to upgrade the cpus in this regard. Should I be concerned about any issues?
_______________________________
Since I will have empty bays with the limited number of hard drives, do I have to run the "blank caddies?" I have 2 of them but am 4 short. Are they necessary for any kind of SCSI termination or are they required to maintain the proper cooling flow through the existing hard drives? (My guess is flow but I could be very wrong.)
____________________________
Any help would be greatly appreciated and of course,
Thanks in advance,
Tom