IBM Simple-swap: So simple... who the %&#! knows how to do it?!

I recently purchased an application server to dole out things like Office, Symantec, etc so I didn't need anything huge. Just big enough to hold the apps I was going to deploy and it would act as a file server for employee access. Not a big deal, right? A simple order, indeed!

Not so much if you're IBM. I've had several X-series IBM servers and I've loved all of them. I've "heard" of simple-swap but I've always gone with the hot-swap because the drives offered more speed for what I wanted. I didn't need anything fancy with this server so I went with the cheaper option of simple-swap drives. Oooooh what a mistake. What a mistake indeed.

This server states that it supports Simple-Swap OR Hot-Swap but IBM was not clear what the difference is (For those of you dying to know - Simple-Swap is simple SATA hard drives, Hot-Swap is SAS or Serial Attached SCSI. Both conform to the SATA form factor for data/power which makes it slightly confusing).

So we get all the hardware in and we go to slap in the drives (Hot-swap SAS drives) and they will not fit. Eh? Check the IBM site, IBM says they are viable hard drives but they won't! Take the drives out? The drive backplane has been completely destroyed. The drive plugs don't fit exactly in that if you look at typical SATA drive there's nothing between the power/data plugs.. these specific hard drives had a block that when pushed into the backplane destroyed the plug. Fortunately the drives survived, just the backplane was wasted but IBM was willing to replace that part.

So after a call to my rep and some to IBM I find that Simple-Swap and Hot-Swap are not inter exchangeable (the backplane could of told them that) and that it must be a bad listing on the site. After several days of being able to chew this over I think it's just a new server line that IBM rolled out because the RAID controller is capable of using the SAS plugs so it doesn't interface with the motherboard... a backplane swap out would work. But it's hard to explain exactly.

So we get the new hard drives in that are regular simple-swap hard drives and these fit beautifully. Install them, install the raid controller and.... oh... seriously? The raid controller doesn't plug into the drives? What's going on here? The raid controller is for SAS drives only and for a backplane that doesn't come with this server. So here we go again, RMAing the raid controller. Get the new controller next day, plug it in, boot the server, mirror the drives and finally I have Windows Server 2008 installed and ready to go.

Now if I only had some network cable to plug it into the network. I used up all my cable supply moving into the new building... sigh.