A bit heavy . . . but doesn't matter once it's in the rack
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
I have recently installed a couple of the IBM x445 servers at work, and as I've been generally impressed with the way they've performed, thought I'd share my findings.
I won't go through the finer and minute technical details of this server simply because that wouldn't be a review- that would be simply copying the specification, which anyone can read anyway. I decided it be a lot more helpful to describe in business terms the benefits of the server, and how reliable and effective it has been in our infrastructure. Nevertheless, some bare technical details should be discussed- so in essence, let me point out that it comes with 2Gb of RAM and 2 Intel Zeon processors running at 2.5 GHz. It has the capability of using up to 64Gb of RAM (if you should ever really need to). There are the usual slots available for adding SCSI hard disks, in much the same way as any rackable server- you pull the lever out, insert the disk, and plug it back in- all hot-swappable.
That's the bare basics of the technical details. We are running ours with Red Hat Linux Enterprise installed and have not had any issues so far with this. This server is also powerful enough to run almost every enterprise operating system you can throw at it- Windows 2000 and 2003 Datacentre Server editions. Our own Linux installation has run smoothly and the only hiccups we've had along the way have been because of badly-written user applications swamping the CPUs on occasion- a problem fixed by stopping the application (by any means necessary!).
Onto the physical aspects of the server. Firstly, it's *heavy*. VERY heavy. It weighs 50 kg, so when you come to installing it in your server rack, unless you want to do yourself some serious damage, you will need somebody strong and reliable to assist with the installation. (In fact, it's a requriement of health and safety law in any case- but on this occasion it's also good old-fashioned common sense).
The height is just under 18 cm. There are many other rackable servers which are "thinner" than this one, and if you're a bit pushed for space in your server rack, this may not be the best one to go for. IBM do a number of servers which are over three times as thin as this server and ideal if space is at a premium. Happily for us, we had plenty of space in the rack so this wasn't an issue.
At the back of the server there are all the usual ports that you might expect, including of course mouse, keyboard and video ports for plugging the cables from your server switchbox (KVM) device into so that you can flip between servers using just one mouse, keyboard and monitor.
As with most newer servers, the x445 has Gigabit capability- so you can have transfer rates of up to 1Gbit /sec (1000Mbit/sec) to your core LAN switches if of course the switches are Gigabit-capable and you're using CAT6 wiring (CAT5e transfer rates are only 100Mbit/sec max). Sorry if that just suddenly went extemely techie, but there wasn't really another way of saying it- escept perhaps "It's got a really fast network connector at the back!"
Without going into an obscene amount of technical detail, that really is the IBM x445 in a nutshell. Once installed, it works away quite happily and when the users aren't misusing it, it works very quickly indeed. It's a good bit of kit, and if you need something to install a heavy-duty enterprise operating system on, you could do a lot worse than this particular beast of burden.
Thanks for reading!
More details
Reliability
Excellent
Memory / capacity
Excellent
Range of Extra Features
Good
Instruction manual
Good
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