Only recently had the opurtunity to build one of these and if anyone else would like me to put theirs together please drop me a line.
When you first get it out of the box, sorry when you dismantle the wooden palette it comes on from around it and remove the packaging it's kind of disappointing. You've paid all that money and all you've got is big black metal box on wheels. It's kind of like a one drawer filing cabinet. Then you open it up and the inside is one of the best layed out I think I've seen.
I'll start at the front where your hard disk bays are. All the hot swap bays will take either Serial ATA drives or Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives. This means you can set up one array with expensive, high performance SAS drives for your important mission critical stuff and the setup another cheap SATA array for the less accessed stuff such as archived mailboxes and the like. It has a capacity for 12 300GB SAS drives giving 3TB of storage if required. The high vis neon green drive lights were constantly flashing on and off on the one I built because the RAID card is constantly performing data scrubbing which monitors and repairs any errors it finds in the stripes on the array. Apparently all the RAID cards IBM supply do it but only the 8i card has the ability to flash the disk lights whilst it does it which I find kind of bizarre.
Above the drive bays is the CPU tray which, once you have removed all the relevant clips and air channels, can be slid out of the front and up to four processors can be plugged in. Reseat this board and move into the area behind where the CPUs sit to the memory area. The memory is plugged into what are effectively daughterboards each of which will hold 4 sticks of up to 4GB PC3200 chipkill memory. The server can accommodate four of these boards giving a total of 64GB of memory if necessary. All of this is pumped through the new Hurricane memory processor and X3 architecture which basically means blistering throughput of data.
Further back and to the left and down as well if I remember rightly (it's quite big) are all of your expansion slots and where the RAID card plugs in. It is secured front and back by some nicely fitting clips that click reassuringly into place (don't forget to connect the battery).
At the back you will find the two hot swap power supplies with room for a third once you unclip the metal cover blocking the empty space where it should go.
As a nice final touch the the fault panel that is normally attached to the side of the X236 is housed in a little self contained unit that pops out of the front and tilts down for you to examine. This whilst being very snazzy is connected on a sliding ribbon cable which slid out very well but didn't like going back in as easily and took a bit of wiggling on the one I built. Hopefully on a server of this build quality it shouldn't be out that often, and for those of you with a fascination for neon's yes it has got a blue one :)
Overall then a great big 7U, super fast, massive storage, cutting edge, well thought out, fault tolerent, expandable, expensive, filing cabinet. Worth every penny!!!
More details
Reliability
Excellent
Memory / capacity
Excellent
Range of Extra Features
Excellent
Instruction manual
Good
Evaluate this review
How helpful would this review be to someone making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
This product has not yet been reviewed. 
