When buying a hot-swap SAS or SATA 3.5″ hard drive for use in your new HP Proliant DL185 G5 you can acquire them directly from HP with the drive carrier (or sled, caddy) already attached.  This is the easiest method.  If you are like me and prefer to select your own drives from third party makers (in my case, I want to use low power, high capacity Seagate Barracuda LP drives) then you must purchase your hot swap drive sleds separately.  Finding the correct part number from HP can be quite a hassle.  Even calling them for support can be tricky as almost no one buys this part directly.

If you wish to get your drive trays separately and not through HP you may be in tough shape.  HP does not stock this part and, in fact, is unable to even look up this part number for you.  I spent some time working with HP in the US on this issue and they were able to provide a visual confirmation on the part for me but could not verify the quality or the usability of the third party drives that I was able to find.  So I was stuck taking a risk to see if these drives would work.  For some machines HP can provide a part number and sometimes can even sell the caddy themselves, but not in the case of the 185 G5.  I have taken the time both with HP and with the third party vendors and with the server in-hand to verify these parts so you do not have to do so.

The part that you need to purchase is HP Part Number: 373211-001.  This part is generally priced around $35 USD.  You will need as many as fourteen of them to fully populate the DL185 G5 drive with the two optional large drive bays (twelve in front and two in back) but you can use them individually as well, or course.  I have had good luck and have gotten a good price getting these trays from Discount Technology: DL185 G5 Hot Swap Drive Tray.

Beware of shops attempting to sell you a much lower cost alternative to this part number.  Quite often the lower cost part is actually a drive blank.  A drive blank is simply a plastic air dam that corrects airflow through the server chassis when a drive is not present. Many of these drive blanks should ship with your DL185 G5 when it is new.  They are readily available and very inexpensive but, mostly, useless.

The big advantage of working with third party sleds and drives is that the DL185 G5 can be populated for thousands of dollars less and can house as much as 28TB of storage in a tiny 2U server.  This is possibly the second densest storage unit on the market when used with the Seagate Barracude LP 2TB drives – the densest is the Sun x4500 “Thumper” 4U storage server at many times the cost of the DL185.

Also, when ordering a DL185 G5 you should be aware that if you get the larger twelve hard drive front drive bay that you cannot also have a front loading optical drive and will need to get your optical drive rear facing.  If you get the optional dual hot swap rear facing drive option then you cannot have a rear facing optical drive.  If you choose both of these options you must use a USB-based optical drive in order to boot from optical media.  This is not always obvious when you are attempting to order one of these machines.

So you acquire one.  The first thing that you may realize is that you have absolutely no way to connect to it.  Well, this can be made pretty difficult by the fact that we do not know what state your server is in.  If it is in pristine condition then the easiest thing to do will be to set the IP address via ARP since DHCP is disabled by default.

Look on the info card on the front of your server (on my rx2600 this is a card that has a tiny handle that you can pull forward.)  On this card is the unit’s MAC address.  Use this to manually set the IP address of the management system via a computer on the local subnet.  First, make sure that you have plugged in and plugged in the management console ethernet connection.  In this example we will set the management system address to 192.168.2.28:

arp -s ma-ca-dd-re-ss-00 192.168.2.28

ping 192.168.2.28

Where the MAC Address is the address of your machine (not my cleaverly written MAC address!)  If all goes well this will set your system address and you will be good to go.  If you system has already been set up for DHCP then this technique will not work.  Check your DHCP server logs to see what address was handed out to the MAC Address that you just looked up.

Now, using Windows telnet or, better yet, the amazing PuTTY tool you can connection to your new server’s management console:

telnet 192.168.2.28

Or, of course, you can connect via your web browser if you have Java installed:

http://192.168.2.28/

Now, if you have an older version of MP the username / password that you are looking for are both blank by default.  Just hit the enter key a couple of times and you should be in.  If your MP firmware has been updated then the default username and password are Admin / Admin along with a default operator of Oper / Oper.

If your system is like mine you will now be presented with some warning and a notice that you must press ^Ecf in order to access the system.  This can be a bit confusing.  Here is the long description that helps to solve the mystery of what to press: Hit Control-e, then release completely.  Then press c.  Then press f.  This is a three key “sequence” not a “chord.”  Only the first character in the sequence is “controlled”.

If this wasn’t confusing enough, after hitting this three key sequence you then need to hit Control-b in order to be dropped to the Management Process system.

If all goes well, you will be dropped to the MP> command parser so that you can begin to use your system.  I include this all here because my first experience with an HP Integrity rx2600 was a bit daunting and everyone online seemed to assume a rather extensive amount of access to documentation, cabling, HP resources and mind reading capacity.

Good luck and welcome to the world of the HP Integrity server!

When buying a hot-swap SAS or SATA 2.5″ hard drive for use in your new HP DL385 G5 you can acquire them directly from HP with the drive carrier (or sled, caddy) already attached.  This is the easiest method.  If you are like me and prefer to select your own drives from third party makers (in my case, I want to use high performance Seagate drives) then you must purchase your hot swap drive sleds separately.  Finding the correct part number from HP can be quite a hassle.  Even calling them for support can be tricky as almost no one buys this part directly.

I have already done the legwork to find the correct part number and have purchased and tested this part to be sure that it is correct.  The part that you need to purchase is HP Part Number: 378343-002.  This part is generally priced around $50 USD.  You will need eight of them to fully populate the DL385 G5 drive housing but you can use them individually as well, or course.

Beware of shops attempting to sell you a much lower cost alternative to this part number.  Quite often the lower cost part is actually a drive blank.  A drive blank is simply a plastic air dam that corrects airflow through the server chassis when a drive is not present.  Seven of these drive blanks should ship with your DL385 G5 when it is new.  They are readily available and very inexpensive but, mostly, useless.

If you need to reach HP’s Parts Store directly you can call them at (800) 227-8164 in the US.

I got to Summit and got the company shuttle there which was very simple to do. This cuts half an hour or more off of the time that it takes me to get out to Warren on the days when I go out there. It is really too bad that I didn’t know how easy this was for the past eighteen months or I might have gotten rid of the car long ago. Going to Warren this way is a bit of a pain but great for once a week. Going to Manhattan is definitely the way to go though by train. I am really learning the advantages of not having a car though. In the past month I have not driven a single time and I don’t miss it at all. Never once have I wished that I even had the option of getting into my car. I don’t even think about it now. It is awesome.

The company shuttles are really nice, for the most part. People have made a big deal about how Google and Microsoft offer these types of shuttle services in the San Francisco and the Seattle (Redmond) areas but they are clearly not the only ones. Maybe their shuttle systems are a bit more intricate because they have larger populations in a single area but the shuttle system that we have here in the New York Metro is pretty decent when combined with the incumbent train system.

I was in Warren today for a “meeting” (sales pitch really) with HP and AMD. That was over lunch and they provided pizza which is really great because I don’t have a car when I am in Warren so getting pizza at these meetings is much nicer than going down to the cafeteria and it is enough to offset the extra cost of the NJ Transit train versus the normal PATH train. (How cheap am I to even realize that?)

The meeting was good and I managed to snag more of the awesome HP Bistro coffee mugs that they give out sometimes. I got one a few months ago and it is Min and my favourite mug and we always fight over it. Now I have two more so we can use them all of the time. This has to be one of the best marketing items ever. Simple, inexpensive (more or less) but very, very nice and useful. “Sure,” you say, “lots of companies give out coffee mugs.” And you are correct. They do. But these are very nice bistro coffee mugs that are much nicer than your average, run-of-the-mill coffee mugs. They are our favourite mugs to drink out of. Much nicer than what we are normally able to buy in the stores. And since we are both big fans of HP (we do own several HP desktops and several HP laptops and several HP servers) it makes it that much cooler to have around the apartment.

We also got two neat travel alarm clock slash thermometer slash USB hub units as gifts from AMD. Which also works out well as we are big AMD fans too. I like their products and I like them as a company and I really appreciate the fact that they do most of their fab work in Dresden and have done a tremendous amount to help rebuild that city. AMD is also considering putting another major fab facility into Upstate NY which would be great. I expect that it would be very near IBM’s fab facility in the middle Hudson Valley region. That is already a hotspot for high end chip research and development. (Kingston, a leader in non-CPU type chip manufacturing is headquartered there as well.)

I spent most of my afternoon in informal meetings as my time in Warren is normally spent catching up with people that I only get to see two or three times in a month. And next week is going to be crazy as I have another HP thing on Tuesday afternoon and then am flying to the UK on Friday evening! So not a lot of “work” was done today but a lot was accomplished. For whatever that is worth.

The shuttle home missed the evening train by about thirty seconds. I ended up having to wait at the station for about thirty minutes. But it worked out. There was a nice guy who had interviewed with someone at my office today who was using the shuttle and train to get home and didn’t speak English comfortably and didn’t know the train system and he was stuck with me so I was able to get him to where he needed to go and otherwise he would have been on his own. So it was a blessing, I am sure.

Dominica made fish bites for dinner and had everything mostly ready when I got home so that we could eat right away. I was exhausted today and we had decided that tonight had to be a blow-off night because I was so tired. I had fallen asleep four or five times easily just on the shuttle ride from Warren to Summit! Can’t be stress – I feel great. Can’t be a lack of sleep – I have been catching up all week. No idea why. Must just be one of those days. Lack of caffeine, perhaps.

We watched two episodes of Buck Rogers in the Twenty Fifth Century and were off to bed early. I am hoping to do some serious sleep catching up tonight so that I can be useful again tomorrow.

Today was the fourteenth biggest drop in the Dow Jones Industrial in history. Not quite a disaster but definitely a huge hit. There were several factors that anyone following today will be acutely aware of – the dollar has become insanely weak and there is a panic that China is going to diversify its currency holdings away from the USD, General Motors wrote down almost forty billion today without much warning and the financial sector has been taking a huge beating do to the subprime mortgages disaster that happened some time ago (a month or two) but is only hitting the street with real numbers recently. The Royal Bank of Scotland is estimating a finance industry wide loss due to the subprime mortgages of approximately one quarter of a trillion US Dollars. (Which, I suppose, is good that at least the dollar isn’t worth so much. Ha ha.) I record this so that later readers can see the juxtaposition of events more clearly.

Another day of “dollar value” battering leading up to Min and my trip to the UK. Can’t win them all, I guess.