IBM System x3620 M3 review

Whereas the majority of vendors want their 2U rack servers to be all-rounders, IBM’s latest System x3620 M3 has a sharper focus on storage. Unlike the recommended HP ProLiant DL380 G7, the x3620 is designed primarily with high storage capacity as a key feature.

To this end, the x3620 only supports high capacity 3.5in SAS and SATA hard disks, and has room in its front panel for up to eight drives. IBM offers a good range of storage choices as you can keep the price down and go for high-capacity, low-performance SATA drives.

The base system relies on an embedded SATA controller, which supports up to four cold-swap 2TB drives plus mirrored and striped arrays. IBM offers SAS and near-line SAS drives too, but you’ll need to upgrade the embedded RAID controller to use them.

We had the basic ServeRAID M1015 eight-port PCI Express card, which can handle mirrors and stripes, but this can be upgraded with an advanced feature key to support RAID5 and 50. The M5014 PCI Express card has eight 6Gb/s SAS ports plus 256MB of onboard cache, while the M5015 is optimised for SSDs and has 512MB of cache memory and a battery backup pack.

If you want more storage options from your IBM server then check out the PC Pro recommended x3650 M3. This closely matches the DL380 G7 for features, because it supports eight 3.5in or sixteen 2.5in SFF drives.

The x3620 exhibits IBM’s solid build quality, and the chassis has a completely tool-free design. Accessing the interior is simple, although it isn’t as tidy as we’ve come to expect from IBM’s servers.

Four fans at the front look after motherboard and hard disk cooling but, unlike the DL380 G7 or Dell’s PowerEdge R710, they’re not hot-swappable. They aren’t as easy to remove either, because all fans are mounted in a single tray and individually cabled to a narrow power board tucked down behind the drive bays.

A single expansion cage sits to one side and provides three PCI Express slots. However, only two of them are accessible from the backplate. The third slot is located much further back inside the chassis, and is only suitable for RAID cards that are internally cabled to the drive backplane.