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Re: HP DL380 G5 Replacement?

 
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Lordmonkey
Occasional Visitor

HP DL380 G5 Replacement?

Hi there,

 

We currently use several "HP DL380 G5" servers and need to find suitable backups for disaster recovery. Trouble is we can't seem to procure these anymore.


Is there a "drop in and replace" current generation server that has at least the performance and all the features of the HP DL380 G5?

 

Cheers,

Lordmonkey.

4 REPLIES 4
Johan Guldmyr
Honored Contributor
Solution

Re: HP DL380 G5 Replacement?

Hi,

is what you want a server where you can just move all the disks, cpu, dimms, pci cards into another server and they'd all work there?

Well there are G6,G7 and Gen8 of the DL380. I do not know which are still available for procurement. You could cross-check the components you have installed in your servers and see if they are compatible with any of those. The quickspecs can help with this, here is the one for DL380 G6: http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13234_na/13234_na.pdf
David_Schwartzs
Honored Contributor

Re: HP DL380 G5 Replacement?

The DL380 G7 would probably be your best bet. In the event your G5 failed, you could swap your data drives into the G7 and be up and running with minimal effort.

The DL380p Gen8 and DL380e Gen8 use different drive sleds and wouldn't be as easy to swap hard disks if you need to.

With the performance of current Gen8 systems, you could likely migrate multiple of your DL380 G5 systems into virtual machines hosted on a single Gen8. Once you have your systems virtualized, particularly if you use a resilient SAN storage architecture like HP StoreVirtual, you can fully automate disaster recovery & failover. (In fact, you could repurpose the DL380 G5 servers into SAN storage using HP StoreVirtual VSA software!) That'd be my recommendation.
Regards,
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Sbrown
Valued Contributor

Re: HP DL380 G5 Replacement?

The G5 eats up 300-400 watts all the time! A DL380p gen8 can run at 1/3 the power profile.

To use your old drives, simply buy an enclosure (DS2600/ds2700) and external raid controller and you can boot them.

However the architecture is so different without a hypervisor there is no way to just move the drives and expect the o/s to work.

Linux maybe, freebsd yes, windows 2003 - heck no. Windows 2008 - heck no. 2012 - no.

ESXi - YES!

Remember those G4/G5 units use 3 to 4 times the power so your OPEX savings will be tremendous and it is a great time to virtualize everything!

Ebay sells fully loaded G5 units for $300-500 (8 drives, 32gb ram, dual cpu) if you need the exact same model for compliance. You can get short warranties squaretrade even!

No shame in buying used if it is the easiest path until you can afford or upgrade - remember the biggest cause of downtime is upgrades! Take your time and plan it out carefully.

I would donate the old G5's when you are done, a DL380P with 8 core, 192gb of ram, 14 sas drives and 2 ssd is about 120watts. Compared to your dual-cpu,32gb, 8 drive dl380 G5 which is 300-400 watts!

Be green - do not continue to use power wasting heat generating old technology!
Lordmonkey
Occasional Visitor

Re: HP DL380 G5 Replacement?

Thanks for all the replies!

 

I appreciate the suggestions for virtualisation, but this will be a no-go i'm afraid. Any change to the solution in terms of network organisation or system dependency is out of the question and would cause months of extra work for all parties involved. We simply need all the software (running on Windows Server 2008) to be installable from scratch on replacement hardware should the old hardware fail.

 

The idea about moving the blades over is a good one, thanks!

 

I will look a the G6+ system specifications and see what i can see.

 

Kind regards,

Lordmonkey