HP ProLiant MicroServer owners' thread

I'm not a hardware person and I'm hoping there are some tried and true recipes for connecting a Microserver (36L) to an LTO5 drive. We are a small shop digitizing archival motion picture film producing 200 to 750GB of large files per day. We want to implement LTO both for internal backup and because some of our clients insist on LTO delivery. I have tried contacting HP in several different ways concerning connecting a LTO drive to our microserver with confusing and frustrating results. I hope that some members here have successfully setup the Microserver with an LTO5 drive and might have some recommendations for a configuration that is working for them. My searches turned up only one post related to using a SCSI card to connect to LTO3. Do I need a low-profile SAS card to connect the LTO5 drive or does the Microserver already have the necessary ports built-in to connect to a 6 Gb/sec SAS LTO5 drive?
-Thanks for any help!
 
djflow195 said:
The N36L and N40L do not have SAS ports, internal or external.

Get a low profile external SAS card and use an external LTO5 drive:

SAS Card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118116

LTO5 Drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16840108119

I have not done this myself.

What I am using is an RDX drive to backup my HP N40L.
Click to expand...

Thanks very much for the response!
I guess HP doesn't sell the right card for the Microserver and thus the impossibility of getting an answer from them.
-Thanks again for taking the time, I'll look into that card and be sure to post back if/how it works out.
 
A friend of mine uses the HP P212 controller in his microserver with good results. The P212 has one external and one internal SAS port.

I have the P412 in mine and it been working great for over a year now.
 
I am using Adaptec cards on all my Microserver - they all come with additional low profile plates ..

Have a look at their product page for external port ones - but downside is - they aren't cheap ..
 
bbito said:
Thanks very much for the response!
I guess HP doesn't sell the right card for the Microserver and thus the impossibility of getting an answer from them.
-Thanks again for taking the time, I'll look into that card and be sure to post back if/how it works out.
Click to expand...

Yes they do, HP SC44Ge card;)

.
 
Thanks Stanza33, Gomjaba and Callek!
I had a feeling I just wasn't getting through to the right HP contacts.
An additional question related to LTO HBAs: I found an IBM white paper on upcoming LTO6 stating that their drives will have FC-8 and 6Gb-SAS connectivity. Does anyone have a feeling of whether 3Gb-SAS HBA will drive LTO6? It seems like it should since native transfer rate is only supposed to reach 160MB/s which Google tells me is 1.25Gb/s...
Thanks again for the great responses thus far.
 
bbito said:
Thanks Stanza33, Gomjaba and Callek!
I had a feeling I just wasn't getting through to the right HP contacts.
An additional question related to LTO HBAs: I found an IBM white paper on upcoming LTO6 stating that their drives will have FC-8 and 6Gb-SAS connectivity. Does anyone have a feeling of whether 3Gb-SAS HBA will drive LTO6? It seems like it should since native transfer rate is only supposed to reach 160MB/s which Google tells me is 1.25Gb/s...
Thanks again for the great responses thus far.
Click to expand...

I expect LTO6 drives to run the gamut of interfaces, SAS6 and SAS12 included. We are waiting for LTO6 upgrades for some of our changers now (and some are SAS), should be in just after the first of the year.
 
bbito said:
The Register says: "IBM's LTO-6 drive will be available from 9 November"
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/10/06/ibm_lto_6_drive/
Posted in Storage , 6th October 2012 09:00 GMT
Click to expand...

Never trust the register for dates :) We are waiting for upgrades from IBM, HP, Spectralogic and Tandberg. Everyone is saying mid 1Q13 for anything but eval drives and there won't be any tapes available in quantity until at least then either.
 
mwroobel said:
Never trust the register for dates :) We are waiting for upgrades from IBM, HP, Spectralogic and Tandberg. Everyone is saying mid 1Q13 for anything but eval drives and there won't be any tapes available in quantity until at least then either.
Click to expand...
I'm sure you've been through this with real world experiences and I don't doubt that your time frame is realistic, but The Register is getting 9Nov2012 direct from IBM Europe, Middle East, and Africa Hardware Announcement ZG12-0272 of October 3, 2012
 for what it's worth...
 
bbito said:
I'm not a hardware person and I'm hoping there are some tried and true recipes for connecting a Microserver (36L) to an LTO5 drive. We are a small shop digitizing archival motion picture film producing 200 to 750GB of large files per day. We want to implement LTO both for internal backup and because some of our clients insist on LTO delivery. I have tried contacting HP in several different ways concerning connecting a LTO drive to our microserver with confusing and frustrating results. I hope that some members here have successfully setup the Microserver with an LTO5 drive and might have some recommendations for a configuration that is working for them. My searches turned up only one post related to using a SCSI card to connect to LTO3. Do I need a low-profile SAS card to connect the LTO5 drive or does the Microserver already have the necessary ports built-in to connect to a 6 Gb/sec SAS LTO5 drive?
-Thanks for any help!
Click to expand...

You would need a straight SAS (Non-RAID) card in the x16 slot that has an external SFF-8088 port. LTO5 tape is not like the tape of old, you need to have a decent pipe coming off your drives to feed it, otherwise you end up shoe-shining your tapes and prematurely killing them (and your drive). Depending on the compressibility of your data, as long as your can maintain ~100MB/second (incompressible data(audio/video)) or up to 200MB/second (compressible data(office docs, text, etc)) constantly off your disks you should be fine.
 
mwroobel said:
You would need a straight SAS (Non-RAID) card in the x16 slot that has an external SFF-8088 port.
Click to expand...
Thanks Mwroobel,
The HP SC44Ge that Stanza33 suggested was looking promising, but instead of the SFF-8088 you mention, it has: 1 x4 internal SFF-8484 and 1x4 external SFF-8470 connectors. These are just alphabet soup to me, and I imagine it may be just a question of using a 8484 to 8088 cable, but more concerning to me is that HP only shows LTO4 models in the related options list.
Do you have a suggestion for a specific card that should fit the bill for the microserver 36L?
-preferably one forwards compatible with LTO6 since we may stall this purchase till the beginning of 2013 for the new drives. 99% of what we'd be laying to tape would be incompressable, so it would be fine if we always run with compression off.
 
bbito said:
Thanks Mwroobel,
The HP SC44Ge that Stanza33 suggested was looking promising, but instead of the SFF-8088 you mention, it has: 1 x4 internal SFF-8484 and 1x4 external SFF-8470 connectors. These are just alphabet soup to me, and I imagine it may be just a question of using a 8484 to 8088 cable, but more concerning to me is that HP only shows LTO4 models in the related options list.
Do you have a suggestion for a specific card that should fit the bill for the microserver 36L?
-preferably one forwards compatible with LTO6 since we may stall this purchase till the beginning of 2013 for the new drives. 99% of what we'd be laying to tape would be incompressable, so it would be fine if we always run with compression off.
Click to expand...

The most important question here is how much data are you looking to backup at a time? Are you buying the higher capacity tape just so you wouldn't have to change tapes as often and not for the increased speed that higher level units backup at? If that is the case, you might want to consider (for example) an LTO4 (or LTO5) changer as opposed to a LTO6 single drive. This would give you many advantages, such as being able to automatically move to a blank tape when they exhaust the space on the existing tape with no user intervention.
As to the cables, that is no problem. Most of the HP drives (for example) come with a SFF-8088 port on the drive, and a SFF-8088 to SFF-8088 & SFF-8484 Y cable so you can attach to just about any card. The 416096-B21 is a perfect card for Tape use, and you could also just get a 8088-8470 cable and not worry about routing it internally.
 
mwroobel said:
The most important question here is how much data are you looking to backup at a time? Are you buying the higher capacity tape just so you wouldn't have to change tapes as often and not for the increased speed that higher level units backup at?
Click to expand...
Mwroobel,
I really appreciate all this help!
The LTO6 is attractive for two main reasons: 1) The same clients that request LTO delivery are the ones that don't want any proprietary codec utilized (so either uncompressed/DPX or JPEG2000/lossless), so LTO6 would ensure that in most cases a full 2K project could go out to a single tape, but more importantly there are situations where I could see 4K scans from large 16mm reels needing to be segmented across two tapes. 2) It just seems to make more sense to go with the current generation especially since we imagine only using LTFS, so backwards write capability to LTO4 doesn't look appealing, whereas LTO5/6 write capability does. I am going to seriously consider your arguments for LTO5 auto-loading!
-Thanks again!
 
bbito said:
Mwroobel,
I really appreciate all this help!
The LTO6 is attractive for two main reasons: 1) The same clients that request LTO delivery are the ones that don't want any proprietary codec utilized (so either uncompressed/DPX or JPEG2000/lossless), so LTO6 would ensure that in most cases a full 2K project could go out to a single tape, but more importantly there are situations where I could see 4K scans from large 16mm reels needing to be segmented across two tapes. 2) It just seems to make more sense to go with the current generation especially since we imagine only using LTFS, so backwards write capability to LTO4 doesn't look appealing, whereas LTO5/6 write capability does. I am going to seriously consider your arguments for LTO5 auto-loading!
-Thanks again!
Click to expand...

If you are going to do LTFS, keep in mind that out of the box there is no concept of spanning in LTFS, and you need a third party app to do spanning. With QStar, you can setup a pair of tapes or an entire library to be a single mount point, and it will deal with the tape changing itself. Another thing you need to take into consideration the hardware life cycle of your clients. If they aren't updating to LTO6 for example, you will have to use whatever they support so you need to make sure the drive you get has write capabilities to the lowest common denominator.
 
mwroobel said:
If you are going to do LTFS, keep in mind that out of the box there is no concept of spanning in LTFS, and you need a third party app to do spanning. With QStar, you can setup a pair of tapes or an entire library to be a single mount point, and it will deal with the tape changing itself. Another thing you need to take into consideration the hardware life cycle of your clients. If they aren't updating to LTO6 for example, you will have to use whatever they support so you need to make sure the drive you get has write capabilities to the lowest common denominator.
Click to expand...
Good Points!
Avoiding spanning is one of my hopes vis-a-vis LTO6.
Concerning client hardware adoption, LTO requests have only come up as LTO5 thus far, I think most clients on this level will have LTO6 shortly after roll-out.
My intended Microserver 36L build is:

INTENDED USES
  • Extremely low volume LAMP stack for our 3-5 user in-house project tracking system
  • Low usage access to our internal Dokuwiki
  • Samba file shares for Mac OSX and Windows 2000/XP/Win7 clients
    (Intermittent, manual large copies of very large files)
  • Direct connect of Wiebetech RTX400 - 2TB RAID10 NTFS / eSATA
    (for backup of raw scan data that is written to this box)
  • Feeding LTO5 or LTO6 drive

INITIAL BUILD
  • HP 36L (bought it last year..)
  • 2 x 2GB Kingston ECC RAM
  • O41_AHCI.ROM to enable 5th internal and external eSATA
  • CentOS 6.3 w/ NTFS-3G
  • Boot Drive and Lamp Stack: OCZ Agility 3 AGT3-25SAT3-60G
  • Samba file shares: 2 x 2TB EXT4 Volumes
    (RAID0 Volume: 2 x WD RE3 1TB - For feeding LTO5/6)
    (RAID1 Volume: 2 x WD Caviar Black 2TB)
    (I wish the 36L included RAID10 support - I'd just do a 4 disk RAID 10)

TBD
  • LTO5 or 6 drive - Likely HP
  • HP SC44Ge
 
Last edited:
djflow195 said:
Funny because mine is configured for RAID10 using the latest BIOS.
Click to expand...
Hi djflow195,
Can you share some specifics? My searches for RAID10 only seemed to pull up folks with h/w RAID card... To enable full SATA on 4/5 I used the BIOS hack described on this Overclockers Australia Forum post.
When I pull up the RAID utility (cnt-F during startup) I only seem to have 0 and 1 RAID options. Please help me get RAID10 going on my 36L if possible.
My BIOS comes up as ID: 041 Version 01/17/2011.
 
bbito said:
Hi djflow195,
Can you share some specifics? My searches for RAID10 only seemed to pull up folks with h/w RAID card... To enable full SATA on 4/5 I used the BIOS hack described on this Overclockers Australia Forum post.
When I pull up the RAID utility (cnt-F during startup) I only seem to have 0 and 1 RAID options. Please help me get RAID10 going on my 36L if possible.
My BIOS comes up as ID: 041 Version 01/17/2011.
Click to expand...

N36L with 4 500 WD RE drives in RAID 10 via the BIOS. Unfortunately, this box is in production at a remote site so I can't down it to get into the BIOS to get you details.
 
Okay, got into another N36L and have:

BIOS O41, date 07/29/2011

Option ROM Utility (c) 2010 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. v 3.2.1549.33

In LD Define Menu -> RAID Mode:

RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10, JBOD, RAID READY

Maybe because you don't have 4 of the same drives?
 
djflow195 said:
Option ROM Utility (c) 2010 Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. v 3.2.1549.33

In LD Define Menu -> RAID Mode:
RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10, JBOD, RAID READY

Maybe because you don't have 4 of the same drives?
Click to expand...
Hi djflow195,
Thanks for checking!
My ROM Utility version matches the v 3.2.1549.33 you show, maybe it's my firmware...
I can see my heterogeneous drives not allowing RAID 10, but it seems suspect that I don't get JBOD or "RAID READY" options, only 0/1...
Do you have the hacked firmware to bring the eSATA and ODD ports up to 3G?
Maybe that isn't required any longer and I should just find and apply the stock 07/29/2011 firmware??? Before I go there and possibly bring my boot drive (ODD/port 5) to its knees, I'll dig up a matched set of 4 and see if that does anything.
-Thanks again!
 
djflow195 said:
Maybe because you don't have 4 of the same drives?
Click to expand...
Hi djflow195,
I was afraid of this - I loaded 4 x 500GB RE3 and in the LD Define Menu I still only get 0/1 even after I go down to the Drive assignments and assign all 4 as "Y" which updates the LD Define Menu to show:
RAID Mode: RAID 0 (or RAID 1) and
Drv: 4

I guess I'll need a different firmware if I want to do RAID10 - hopefully one that retains AHCI for ports 4 and 5!
I'll definitely post back if I get this sorted.
-Thanks
 
bbito said:
Hi djflow195,
I'll definitely post back if I get this sorted.
Click to expand...

I flashed TheBay's latest BIOS ROM (19/10/2011) and this provides RAID 10 in the ROM Utility as djflow195 described:
AVForums post: HP N36L Microserver Updated AHCI BIOS Support.
I built the USB key with HP's current Firmware (2011.07.29 (A)) - I'd leave a link, but that ludicrously long URL is probably full of session info and its probably best to go through the product support section to make sure you're getting the current rev. anyway...
The Systems ROMPaq I used is "SP54344.exe" (2.6 MB).

Now I just need to decide if I'll get a 4 x 2TB or 4 x 3TB set for RAID10 or make do with the 2TB@RAID0 + 2TB@RAID1 I set up yesterday...

-Thanks for all the help!
 
AbRASiON said:
Any word yet on a replacement model?
Click to expand...

There have been numerous public statements that HP does not intend to abandon the microserver segment.

As to the details if/of the next one... thats not public info... ;)
 
Patriot said:
There have been numerous public statements that HP does not intend to abandon the microserver segment.

As to the details if/of the next one... thats not public info... ;)
Click to expand...


Really? I have seen absoloutely nothing, I've been asking across the web. Got a link?
 
Last edited:
Actually I've already read that article, if you read the back half of it, I'm not entirely sure they are talking about the same microserver product to be honest. That sounds like something almost akin to a blade or something like that.

HP speaks of thousands of systems per rack
Click to expand...
does that sound like the form factor the microservers we're thinking of?

EDIT:
As per article.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Sea...&bih=1008&sei=paV3UJOgPOWSiQfqwYGgDA&tbm=isch
This is more of some kind of many many many servers in small space thing, not the traditional fully cased, mini server for a small business / home. Different products (at least in regards to that article)

So to my knowledge, there's been absoloutely no further talk on development of a replacement to the N40L at all.
 
AbRASiON said:
Actually I've already read that article, if you read the back half of it, I'm not entirely sure they are talking about the same microserver product to be honest. That sounds like something almost akin to a blade or something like that.

does that sound like the form factor the microservers we're thinking of?

EDIT:
As per article.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Sea...&bih=1008&sei=paV3UJOgPOWSiQfqwYGgDA&tbm=isch
This is more of some kind of many many many servers in small space thing, not the traditional fully cased, mini server for a small business / home. Different products (at least in regards to that article)

So to my knowledge, there's been absoloutely no further talk on development of a replacement to the N40L at all.
Click to expand...

I am away from my home pc or id just go look up my history...

They had a paragraph or so on continuing the Small busi microserver...then went to talk about the moonshot stuff with thousands/rack...

That article is talking about more of the thousands/rack I agree...
 
Patience is a virtue I guess, money isn't the issue (within reason) it seems just waiting.
 
Hey guys, I want to share my mod of N36L.

here is the pic.
umw87c

1NmUTv

8txLFB


final build is:

N36L
8G*2 ram
2T*6, 3T*2, 64G slc SSD, 160G 2.5HDD, usb memory stick.
intel EEPRO1000 lan card, LSI 1068E SAS expander.

OS is FreeBSD 9.1 PRELEASE.
usb momory as boot device.
2T*6 and 3T*2 as mirror pool. total 10T space.
64G slc ssd as L2ARC cache.
160G 2.5HDD as swap device. since I don't want to use zvol as swap device.

total power comsume is about 65w, the internal PSU is 200w.
so the PSU is not the problem.

this pic takes when I upgrade two 2T hdds to two 3T hdds.
(previous is 2T*8, samsung HD204UI, the 3T hdds are WD30EZRX)

this build is 1.5years old, pretty stable. ;-)
 
Just finished setting up mine over the weekend :D
16GB RAM (recognised in BIOS, Windows Server 2k8R2, OpenIndiana, NAS4Free, ESXi 5)
4x WD Red 3TB
Intel Quad Port Gigabit NIC
NAS4Free

Running ZFS Striped at the moment but will be rebuilding using RAIDZ-1
 
shaitan667 said:
Just finished setting up mine over the weekend :D
16GB RAM (recognised in BIOS, Windows Server 2k8R2, OpenIndiana, NAS4Free, ESXi 5)
4x WD Red 3TB
Intel Quad Port Gigabit NIC
NAS4Free

Running ZFS Striped at the moment but will be rebuilding using RAIDZ-1
Click to expand...

Nice, which memory did you choose?

What is the plan, bare metal ZFS? Or ESXi with RDM?
 
Anyone know if Intel charges a lot for the Atoms? I was looking at a cpu-world DB and Isaw some of the Atoms look quite capable for a 3'rd series microserver but I'd assume quite expensive knowing Intel?
 
shaitan667 said:
Just finished setting up mine over the weekend :D
16GB RAM (recognised in BIOS, Windows Server 2k8R2, OpenIndiana, NAS4Free, ESXi 5)
4x WD Red 3TB
Intel Quad Port Gigabit NIC
NAS4Free

Running ZFS Striped at the moment but will be rebuilding using RAIDZ-1
Click to expand...

Nice. Would be very interested in which Memory you went for, as setting mine up with OI and 3x3TB, so trying to find 16GB EEC...
 
AbRASiON said:
Anyone know if Intel charges a lot for the Atoms? I was looking at a cpu-world DB and Isaw some of the Atoms look quite capable for a 3'rd series microserver but I'd assume quite expensive knowing Intel?
Click to expand...

Atom boards and procs are quite cheap. I dont have prices off the top of my head but any parts place like newegg has them.
 
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