HP DL180 G6 2U LGA1366 storage server

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ecosse

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Jul 2, 2013
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mrkrad

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Oct 13, 2012
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It is a storage server first, 25 15K 2.5" or 12 15K SAS drives are a tremendous heat load, then to cool the cpu/ram , then the poor RAID/FUSIONIO/INFINIBAND/POWER supplies last! the cabling mess doesn't make it any better (gen8 cables are all FLATWIRE! and work on G6/G7) so I guess it's loud or cooking the goods.

Those 25 watt raid controllers and 150 watt PCI-E video cards need the cooling
 

ecosse

Active Member
Jul 2, 2013
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Err video cards? In a DL180? In any case the fans go crazy whatever you put in the riser slots. I've read some people have hacked Zalman fan controls to slow down the fans. That's all physical stuff so I'd only balls it up if I tried :)
 

mrkrad

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Oct 13, 2012
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well you notice how they hacked two fans into one plug. Why not just source the single fan option but keep in mind overheating your cards is a sure fire way to kill them or have them disable themselves.
 

geeker342

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Jul 17, 2013
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Can you run these servers with a single processor? I'm thinking of buying a base chassis + PSU. I have spare L5520 chips and would use this with UDIMM memory as a storage server. Anything I am missing?
 

ecosse

Active Member
Jul 2, 2013
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well you notice how they hacked two fans into one plug. Why not just source the single fan option but keep in mind overheating your cards is a sure fire way to kill them or have them disable themselves.
Yeah that's a possibility but I would much prefer to be able to control the noise just as HP provided with their DL3X range. I suppose you get what you pay for but turning the fans to pretty much maximum just to cool whatever *could* be in a riser slot is lazy engineering to me. Unless of course I am wrong :) What I will say is like most tier-1 vendor stuff its rock solid and does the job. Just not quietly!
 

gigatexal

I'm here to learn
Nov 25, 2012
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Portland, Oregon
alexandarnarayan.com
Starting a thread on the HP DL180 G6 server. For those wondering - it is a 2U server that takes up to two LGA1366 Intel Xeon 5500 or 5600 series CPUs. dba found these servers and a deal where I purchased mine for around $500 with 2x Intel Xeon L5630 CPUs 2x 2GB DDR3 DIMMs, an a HP P410 RAID controller with 256MB of RAM.

Here's an ebay search I'm using for finding low cost HP DL180 G6 units

Photos

Internal HP DL180 G6 View with HP P410




Top view




ILO 100 Default Username and Password

Still looking for this one. Mine did not work with Administrator / Administrator or Operator / Operator. The system also did not come with a cardboard insert with the default password.

Note: My unit also did not show up with DHCP name and serial number as the server name. I did lookup an IP address for the mac address of d8:d3:85 and that showed up as an HP block which led me to the iLO web interface.

Storage configuration
12x front 3.5" drives fed via a backplane with a SAS expander. The SAS expander is connected with a SFF-8087 cable.
2x rear 3.5" drives fed via 2x 7-pin SAS/ SATA connectors. These are fed by the SAS expander PCB by default but one can easily connect a short SATA cable directly to the motherboard.

Power Consumption
2x Intel Xeon L5630
1x Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD
6x Kingston 8GB RDIMMs
Latest BIOS/ firmware as of 5/8/2013
Idle Power Consumption Ubuntu 12.04: 77w
Max Power Consumption Ubuntu 12.04: 165w observed thus far

More to come
that thing is going to make such a racket, no way. After the c6100 i'm out of the market for these.
 

Chuntzu

Active Member
Jun 30, 2013
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Just wanted to clarify the PCI express options. At most 3 PCI express slots, ex. 3-8x slots? Or is it 3-8x plus the 16x so a total of 4? Just curious if I would be able to have nic plus two SAS hba and a graphic card for workstation duty. Thanks in advance, I have looked through the hp manuals and all the posts in this thread, but still hoping that a setup with 4 PCI express slots (1 being 16x) is possible.
 

mrkrad

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2012
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the 12LFF is actually rated for Quadro 6000. The right side card is x16. then there are two x8 on the left side (full length full height). There is an optional riser and space for the x4 as well. I think the total bandwidth is 3 x8 (not sure how the x4 riser works).

12LFF = 2 x8 and 1 x16, 14LFF = 1 x16 only, dvd-rom option iirc is 2x8, there is a riser to give you x16,x8,x8,x4 but I'm not sure there is actually enough bandwidth for all of that.

I do have a couple of goofy qlogic 8152 which only run at x4 pci-e 2.0 (or x8 pci-e 1.0) so you can work it out from there.

AVOID the 14LFF model if you want any expansion since the raid card fills the only slot.

My preference would be the 8LFF model (no sas expander) and two single 9266-4i - each connected to 4 SSD for maximum throughput. then you could do a 10gbe nic on the x4 if you can find the riser and perhaps a quadro on the x16 (tight fit).

Also get the P4300G2 motherboard, they are $25 and give you ilo2 :) far nicer bios.

The P4300G2 variant of the DL180 G6 is my favorite storage server. with a P420/1gb FBWC and two 10gbe nic's it is very powerful for the $$.
 

mrkrad

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2012
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yeah you can change the fans out if you want, but guy can handle the hottest cards on the market (quadro 6000, p420/1gb fbwc, 10gbe 10gbase-T) without thermal problems as-is.

I was curious. The $70 L5639, where are we with replacing those? Can I get a $140 haswell that is twice as fast in the same power range (10w per core max)? ram bandwidth and i/o bandwidth mostly since cpu tends to rarely be the main choke point.

I guess that would be 64 lanes of pci-e 2.0 speed and 24 dimm "equivalent speed" 2x faster.

How about cpu wise? Are we at the point where I can safely get 2X performance from a haswell cpu upgrade across the board (not one function but all cpu instructions)? Floating point?