After receiving my server, doing the basic setup and even designing a cheap vertical stand, it was time to upgrade it.
Servers like any other computer, are designed around several international standards to ensure compatibility between parts from different manufacturers from all over the world.
But servers are slight more sensitive to certain variations of small details, and that’s why reading the manual is very important.
Before searching and buying memory sticks to upgrade your recently acquired server, specially if you would like add to the currently installed ones, is to pay attention to more aspects than the capacity, latency and voltage rating, and extend the level of precision to include the number of ranks, bandwidth and type.
Another almost camouflaged aspect of a RAM upgrade in a server, that you might realize too late, is the reduction of memory bandwidth when a certain threshold of RAM slots is populated, maximum amount of memory or the lack of compatibility between registered and unbuffured memory sticks.
After carefully reading my server manual, I was able to decide that the maximum I could add (…source and afford…) would be 8 x 4GB PC010600R sticks. This would guarantee 1333MHz operation, compatibility with the current ones, and a total of 40GBs of memory.
A very important consideration is populating the memory sticks correctly, since this is crucial to the optimal operation of the server. The correct order can either be found in the manual, server lid or with the letter sequence in the airflow guide.
For the best possible results, in the case of HP servers, an official server memory configuration tool is available through this link. It will help with the layout, give several configurations and even part numbers.
Another aspect of my server I wanted to upgrade was the storage. After consulting the manual, I realized that even though my RAID controller, a HP Smart Array P410, had 6Gb/s under SAS operation, with SATA drives the transfer rate would be reduced to 3Gb/s, but with the correct RAID configuration I would still have a decent amount of IOPS.
To evaluate each RAID configuration usable capacity and IOPS performance, the calculators at WintelGuy are very useful. I added 2 x 512GB SATA SSDs, since they were cheaper than SAS drives and highly performant.
Upgrading a server might require more attention to small details, but its useful knowledge for any IT professional and enthusiast.
