IBM X3650 Servers

Awhile back, needing to upgrade my servers to continue my projects and desire to learn new things, I purchased two IBM x3650 servers off of EBAY for $125.00 each. Companies are dumping thousands of servers coming off lease from data centers and anyone can buy serious computing power on the cheap. The hard drives are available for $10 each and each server came with dual Xeon dual core 3.2Mhz processors, are loaded up with 24GB ram each and they have USB ports galore plus dual NICs.

Needing to run a full Linux environment to handle my projects and to continue learning, I installed CentOS 7 on both servers in a full Raid 5 configuration. One server is support and handles things such as the MySql and ClusterPoint NOSql databases, subversion, SendMail, and SubSonic Jukebox daemons. The other acts as the front-end server running Wildfly 10, WSO2 ESB Suite, Docker, SugarCRM, Artifactory and Jenkins.

Sure, these servers are running alot of software, but the load is light and things run 24/7. My ancient Pentium 4 based cluster computer also uses the MySql database and other services as needed. I also wired the second NIC cards to act as additional nodes for the cluster computer.

• Powerful 3.0 GHz/667 MHz or 3.2 GHz/1066 MHz1 Intel Xeon processors with 667 or 1066 MHz front-side bus (FSB) and 4 MB L2 cache (each processor is dual core and comes with 2 x 2 MB [4 MB] L2 cache)
• 1 GB of PC2-5300 DDR2 advanced memory features DIMMs, ECC system memory2
• Integrated SAS HDD controller with integrated mirroring
• 835-watt voltage sensing hot-plug power supply
• Up to 10 hot-swap fans, supporting redundant cooling
• Integrated systems-management processor
• Four available PCI-Express slots, or two PCI-X (up to 133 MHz)
• Seven drive bays: 8x-24x3 CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive, six hot-swap HDDs
• Up to six HS SAS 3.5-inch HDDs or eight HS SAS 2.5-inch HDDs, plus internal tape drive bay
• Two broadcom integrated gigabit Ethernet controllers
• ATI RN50 video controller with 16 MB video memory and two video ports
• One serial port, seven USB ports, two Ethernet (RJ-45), one systems management connector4, one external SAS connector, and two video ports