IBM server

[paolo.kunder]

Dear all,
anyone experienced a IBM server?
what about advantages or disadvantages compare to other brand?

[Bukowski]

As long as it does not fail it doesn't matter if its from IBM, Dell, HP or Fujitsu.

Also - more detail would help - what configuration are you talking about? The art of putting a server together is how you specify and configure it, not who you buy it from (although I will never buy another HP server ever again....)

[paolo.kunder]

server configuration

N. 1
7164A2G IBM x3755 M3, 4xAMD Opteron 16C 6282SE
140W 2.6GHz/16MB, 8x4GB, O/Bay HS 3.5in
SATA/SAS, SR M5015, 2x1100W p/s, Rack
N. 12
49Y1397 8GB (1x8GB, 2Rx4, 1.35V) PC3L-10600 CL9
ECC DDR3 1333MHz LP RDIMM
N. 8
81Y9758 IBM 3TB 3.5in 7.2K 6Gbps NL HS SAS HDD
N. 1
49Y7342 1100W Redundant Power Supply
N. 1
46M0902 IBM UltraSlim Enhanced SATA Multi-Burner
N. 1
39M2897 NetBAY 1.5m KVM Conversion Option pack

+ memory expansion
IBM 8GB KIT PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM - 2 x 4GB DIMM

[Bukowski]

And what are you going to use it for? Are your applications memory intensive? Is disk I/O going to be critical? I'm not sure how much memory you have in there - 136GB? That looks like 2GB/core (assuming 16C = 16 core).

I rarely spec out a machine with less than 4GB/core - but it depends on what analysis you're planning to do.

No RAID?

[paolo.kunder]

exactly is 2GB/core. 4xAMD Opteron 16Core so in total 128 GB plus some extension of RAM..still fighting with the IT services...

I will use it for RNA-seq, from alignment to differential expression analysis, plus some Chip-seq and DNA-seq, I will not use it for de novo assembly.

Is a server to start with, I am alone working on it, and we do not have so many samples at the same moment,

what do you mean by no RAID?

[Bukowski]

exactly is 2GB/core. 4xAMD Opteron 16Core so in total 128 GB plus some extension of RAM..still fighting with the IT services...

I will use it for RNA-seq, from alignment to differential expression analysis, plus some Chip-seq and DNA-seq, I will not use it for de novo assembly.

Is a server to start with, I am alone working on it, and we do not have so many samples at the same moment,

what do you mean by no RAID?

I have a 32 core / 128GB RAM machine (and 3x16 core/48GB machines) that I use for similar analyses. I didn't understand earlier about the setup - you have 8X3TB SAS drives - are you going to have them in a RAID configuration?

I only ask as in the past I would have just assumed a RAID1/RAID5 configuration for the drives - OS on RAID1, data on RAID5. But with lots of threads and CPU's writing the next server I'm commissioning I'm going for RAID10, the idea is to increase the read/write throughput which is our current apparent bottleneck.

[paolo.kunder]

so you advice me to ask for a RAID10 on data, and keep RAID1 on OS?

thanks
paolo