Compaq Proliant 8500R from 1999 - (PWJ226)

Another find from our basement.... A Proliant 8500R server from 1999 (2000) with up to 8 CPU's (Pentium 3 Xeon) and HotSwap-PCI, a feature everybody built into their machines but nobody could really use. CORRECTION: The PCI sockets in this machine are 32/64 bit wide, not 16/32 bit as I say (14:15 ...)

[@f.k.b.16]

I remember "hot swapping" a PCI card on a Pentium 3 or 4-ish Dell workstation.... I was in a hurry and accidentally left the power on when switching a card... I was blown away to see it didn't crash and actually started loading new drivers. 🤓

[@jimsvideos7201]

It's amazing how quickly this goes from being the new hotness to scrap value.

[@rysterstech]

the life cycle of tech was over far sooner for these older machines than it is for core2duo and newer machines.

[@jimsvideos7201]

@@NerdyNEET Phones in particular.

[@anonUK]

​@jimsvideos7201 And then they switch off 4G and make all the apps 1GB+ each...

[@TheSeanUhTron]

@@rysterstechYeah, back then you couldn't really use 5yr old computer equipment. These days that's no problem, even with servers! Many big businesses that can afford it will refresh their equipment regularly to avoid age-based equipment failures; Often times they just lease the equipment.

[@paulladdie1026]

I used to run MS Exchange for 2000 users on an eight CPU 700MHz Xeon based system. It cost around £50000 at the time without the external disk cabinet. It was the fastest windows server we had at the company.

[@JapanPop]

I helped transition an older Compaq Proliant to one of these back in the day. It cost our department a LOT of money. But it was our RAID array for the entire division😂

[@SteveInScotland]

These were beautiful machines and practically indestructible. Very nice to work on, even the boxes they were delivered in had a built in ramp and had reusable seals so you could roll it out in the workshop, configure it. Roll it back and deliver it to the end customer.

[@andrewmoser5539]

I grew up with 90s Compaq in the Windows 98 era, and they honestly did some cool stuff with their industrial design and aesthetic. Compaq machines during the Presario era have gentle curves like an air purifier or washing machine, all of their fonts were very faint and in italics, they bundled original content with their computers (like tutorials and unique wall paper/themes)... good stuff...

[@villefilho]

Nice trip to the inside of the server! So many stuff to fail, it´s incredible that still work. The PSUs? totally INSANE. Great video!

[@faolan652]

This brought back some great memories, thanks for showing off this server! I used to work support in the Proliant division at Compaq when this beast was out there, and had one next to my cube that I used to use for Linux kernel compiling across the 8 processors.Those DC converters were called Voltage Regulator Modules (VRMs), and were redundant. One side of the board could have a component fail and the other side would take over without the system going down. I think it was converting to 2 different voltages as well, possibly for the separate cache chip vs processor chip those Xeons had under the cover. That's why it looks like 4 separate sections per VRM board. That Profusion chipset sitting in the middle of the processors and memory board was a Compaq and Corollary design, solving an issue Intel and HP struggled with since the Pentium Pro. Going above 4 processors with Intel chipsets didn't work, the traffic to manage cache coherency between them would overwhelm the CPU bus of that era. IIRC HP tried to crack the 4 processor limit with a 6 processor Pentium Pro machine that performed poorly around that era. Compaq's key was to split the processor bus in two, and use SRAM cards with their own direct connection on both processor busses to sync cache between them. The Profusion chipset also had 2 memory busses, one bus out to the PCI slots, one smaller I/O one, with a crossbar switch distributing traffic among all the busses. This became the chipset other vendors like Dell licensed to ship their 8 processor machines, though Dell made theirs look cheaper with a dirty trick. Their base model one shipped with smaller SRAM cards, limiting the amount of cache the Pentium 2 and 3 Xeons could use to 512KB, instead of the max of 2MB. That hurt performance a bit unless customers paid more for the pair of 2MB SRAM cards. Smart Array wise, this was one of the earlier machines to get the newer integrated version meant for servers like this with only a few drives. They became common in the 1U DL360 servers that launched shortly after the 8500R (which got renamed DL760 and upgraded to PCI-X slots IIRC). The Proliant 8000 was also an 8 CPU server built around the Profusion chipset, but with 2 PCI-ES slots and 4th generation Smart Array 4200ES controllers driving 18 internal drives. Those were wild, in that it routed 3 SCSI connections not over cables, but through the PCI-ES slot. It allowed a redundant controller to be on standby ready to take over if the primary failed, with the SCSI cables attached to the motherboard. That era was when customers were switching from a lot of direct attach SCSI drives to fibre channel SANs, and the 8500R was aimed at those on the SAN side.

[@StringerNews1]

Oh my, what a pig. Those 8-way SMP machines were obscenely expensive, and my testing showed that four 2-way machines outperformed them significantly, and for a lot less money. We used a lot of Proliant 3000R machines. When the Pentium III did away with SECC, the new 1RU machines were great, but couldn't cool themselves if stacked on top of each other. Fun times.

[@ano_nymouse]

we had to use these for large monolithic databases. they were reasonably priced when the equivalent machine that they were replacing were ibm's i-series.

[@StringerNews1]

@@ano_nymouse I was wondering what use there might be for one of these! Thanks. We had big databases, but they were on IBM mainframes, and some VAXen. Our one 8-core machine was originally for Citrix, but didn't perform as well as expected.

[@ChipGuy]

4:11 You said these are all 32 bit PCI sockets. What I see in the video are 64 bit 5V PCI sockets. They got the 64 bit extension on them and the notch is for 5V signalling AFAIK.

[@souta95]

I noticed the same thing. Towards the end he mentioned 32 vs 16-bit PCI connectors... There never was a 16-bit version of PCI...

[@simontay4851]

16bit was ISA. PCI was 32bit from the start.

[@RBLevin]

I love these videos. Nobody does it better.

[@andycristea]

I think you mean 32 and 64bit PCI, not 16 and 32. Awesome machine! I'd love to have one. I have two 900mhz xeons in my collection with those same heatsinks. Now I know where they came from. Thank for sharing and I hope you don't scrap it.

[@johnvanwinkle4351]

That’s not junk that’s cool stuff!!!!

[@movax20h]

I think the progress in power supplies is most staggering and rarely realized thing. As you said you can have same power in like 1/10 of the volume of these old boys. Maybe even more.

[@SeanBZA]

Though the new ones are totally unrepairable, and cook themselves to death in a few years. Those old ones run cooler, have decent airflow and no hot spots, and are serviceable, so that if you need to run a server for a few decades, like banks and others tend to do, they will last the distance.

[@simontay4851]

Yeah but they're built better with more and larger components and bigger heatsinks. Id much rather have one of those PSUs than a modern small one.

[@Wreck-Gar]

I still have a Proliant Ml370 from 1999 with Dual 1GHz P3s and the same LCD Control Panel. Great systems 👍

[@borlibaer]

What a swanky Compaq Monster Server. No wonder why Compaq Proliant was leader in Intel based Server realm that era. I got the RA4000 & RA8000 HSG80 FC storage arrays and the SP750 Workstation.

[@dkmillares]

I love Compaq before it was acquired by HP, because it scrapped the brand. Btw, great video

[@brainthesizeofplanet]

Not the only thing HP scrapped😅

[@lucasrem]

Compaq was just a Box seller, cloned chepa boxes. HP, old people like it, great name that is.

[@PlaywithJunk]

In fact, Im glad that HP continued the Proliants and scrapped their own Netserver line. Those were pretty unreliable but easy to repair. They mostly suffered from bad interconnects. Proliants worked much longer without an issue.... until Gen10 came around. Best HP servers ever were the Gen7. Almost no repairs with them. Gen8 have the horrible soldered flash chip that fails. Gen9 too and additionally mainboard power problems. Gen10 and 11 have stupid firmware issues.

[@OGParzoval]

Man I retired one of those in the early 2000's at Verizon Wireless, it was hiding out in a old comm's closet. Want to say it was running rhel 5 still if I remember right. It was off, but after a power blip it came up and started service dhcp blowing up a few subnets for a few hours till we found it. Moved it to a lab of old things just for nostalgia.

[@sevua]

Ah, sweet. This brings memories.

[@sugurukasima8973]

Nice to meet you, I'm Japanese, and I know Compaq, but I was surprised to see this machine, which I've never seen in Japan.😆

[@PlaywithJunk]

I guess there were not many sold of this size. Two and four processor machines were much more popular.

[@Troppa17]

Thank you for uploading. I really enjoy to see these old servers. Maybe because thats makes me feel young again when I used to read everything I could get about computers. As always I've got some more commentaries: 0:16 UNLIMITED POWER!!!! SCNR😅 4:12 64-bit PCI-X 5 volts I would say. PCI was already 32-bit as well as MCA. 6:19 PIII Xeon tops out at 44 W TDP. So together with that fancy heatpipe coolers it would be sufficient cooling. 8:24 These should be dual redundant power modules / VRMs. Probably two phases 5 volts each. Could be 12V but judgeing by the ninth one used for the bus architecture and how little there is in terms of power delivery on the memory board I would guess it has to be 5 volts. I don't think Compaq used the 2.8 V variant of the PIII Xeon. Seems to far off the 3.3 volts needed for the RAM but I might be wrong on this one. 8:41 These are the Corollary Profusion cluster controllers or chipset as Intel would call them (Intel bought Corollary while they were developing these) that make actually two four CPU servers into one eight CPU server via bus bridge magic if I remember correctly. These two chips on the board would be the northbridges [sic!] while the two cards would be the cache accelerators for maintaining cache coherency for all eight processors. There have to be at least two PCI bridge chips and an Intel southbridge somewhere in there. 14:29 It depends. Typically an PCI card could have three rows of connectors as well if it supports 3.3V AND 5V. While the slot would have only 2 rows depending if it's 3.3 or 5 volts. A PCI-X card could have up to four rows of connectors (3.3V AND 5V aupport) while the slot would have only 3 again depending if it supports 3.3 or 5 volts.

[@thisnthat3530]

I still have a Proliant 5500 with 4x Pentium Pro 200 CPUs and 2GB RAM. It uses the older "rock lobster" drive trays. There are two Smart Array 2 controllers in it.

[@chrisridesbicycles]

„Have“ like own or like running in a productive environment?

[@thisnthat3530]

@@chrisridesbicyclesHave as in own. I do run it occasionally though.

[@daviddunmore7076]

installed three of these back in 1999 to replace four P133 desktops (3 running NT 3.5 an 1 with NT4) - quite why a major UK company would still be using obsolete desktops as servers I never did find out.

[@DarkingDK1]

I remember installing a 3000r, it was replacing an old database we used to run on a VAX system.

[@graz27]

Remember having one of these in a room in my house back in the day that I picked up cheap. But my god the amount of electric that thing used at UK electric rates was crazy and ended up trashing it in a skip. The noise and the heat from it was also crazy.

[@allezvenga7617]

Thanks for your sharing

[@Gr8thxAlot]

I loved the case design on the Compaq's of this era. They were so nice to work on. The hot swap hardware on these is laughable, given the stability of Linux drivers and Windows NT. There were always PLENTY of opportunities to take an outage to replace components.

[@offrails]

I think the Internet probably wants to know how that thing does games

[@PlaywithJunk]

It will certainly do all games from 1995 to 2005... :-)

[@Rotterdam93]

I love this junk ❤

[@beamsio]

Standard PCI slots are 32bit. The longer ones in this server are 64bit.

[@PlaywithJunk]

Yeah I know.... I mixed 16/32 up with 32/64 ;-)

[@happyraver1958]

The nostalgia is killing me.

[@jul1440]

That is the max power rating (both supplies) of an American 240 volt 30 amp electric stove/dryer!

[@lucasrem]

I used Proliant server back then, installed more Xeons in them, great scalability. Not the same model. I did run Oracle 10i etc on them.

[@SimbaSeven.]

I would love something like that for my BBS

[@LemmingGoBoom]

Looked it up, the CPU had a TDP of 29.6W, so even with 8 of them it was only 240W to dissipate.

[@Conenion]

The ST32171WC harddrive is a rebranded Seagate Barracuda. 7200rpm.

[@blackIce504]

the pci-X bus is 64bit running at a base of 66mhz up to 533Mhz bus on pci-x 2.0 also this system is a beast of a rig, i can't imagine how much this would have cost.

[@LMB222]

Tantalum capacitors everywhere…

[@PlaywithJunk]

But obviously the good ones that don't fail in 25 years :-)

[@ckm-mkc]

I had one of these in my house for a while - it used around $70/month in electricity....

[@simontay4851]

Wow, thats very expensive to run. So that $70 was on top of your usual electric bill for your house?. My total electric bill is £50 a month for my whole house!

[@SeanBZA]

Thos PSU units supply 2 voltages IIRC, one for Vcore and one for IO, the 2 per side is just to interleave them to reduce ripple. Took apart a much simpler Proliant, and it only had a single processor and power supply card with the 2 voltages for the CPU. Had 2 SCSI drives, and actually still booted to Red Hat enterprise 4.0, though the full height drive was incredibly noisy bearing wise, likely not long for this world. Definitely was not as it went to pieces and to scrap metal, though I did make a recording of the noise using a piezo accelerometer that I screwed to the drive.

[@haralamc]

I feel another gold harvesting video coming up 😉

[@ChipGuy]

Thanks for sharing that interesting retro machine. This is going to be scrapped, right?

[@l3p3]

I guess Ebay or museum.

[@swrzesinski]

@@l3p3 I would hope so, but really low chances....

[@rabidbigdog]

So much of the design approach seems Digital to me, but I might be mis-remembering. Hewlett Packard certainly scrapped their server designs and replaced them with Compaq's family.

[@PlaywithJunk]

And I see some Apple design in the DECstation 4000. I guess that some designers went from one company to anoher and took their ideas with them. Or the just copied good ideas 🙂 Digital was bought by Compaq and a few years later swallowed by HP. It was quite a mixup in those days. Fortunately HP discontinued their Netserver line and continued with the Proliants.

[@borlibaer]

COMPAQ had been a very swanky Company in Computer Business with excellent Products in all Fields. In addition we have to be very grateful for it's engagement to make PC available and usable to the public and PC "Clone" standardisation by defeating IBM's arrogant Big Blue leadership politics.

[@PlaywithJunk]

Yes. And right now HP is destroying all this by acting themself like a "big leader" but people don't take it anymore. HP policy about software/firmware updates is horrible. So bad that they had to move back to normal after court decision. Good luck trying to download the Support Pack for Gen9 servers...

[@danthompsett2894]

what a machine upto x8 P3 Xeons looks like you could have a lot more RAM in there to, got to wonder how well it could run windows 10 and say Quake 3

[@Petertronic]

Great machine, built to work and to last and to be serviced. Are modern servers no longer made to be this easy to service?

[@PlaywithJunk]

Modern servers have less parts and that makes them easy to repair. A new HPE G10 or a Dell R660 have about 6 cables to unplug, two power supplies and two PCI riser modules to remove and you can take out the mainboard.

[@chrisridesbicycles]

Where did you dig up that oldie? Does somebody still use them?

[@movax20h]

This tech was obsolete 15 years ago already. Your phone has more processing power than this thing.

[@chrisridesbicycles]

@@movax20h That‘s why I asked. Does somebody still put 2000W of power into such an old system because it‘s part of some certified system?

[@SeanBZA]

@@chrisridesbicycles Most likely, or it was doing some important but unglamourous work in a data centre, and was just running along with nobody caring about it. Either it had all the redundancy finally drop out of the RAID, and it fell over hard, causing a massive issue, or somebody noticed the red lights of doom impending, and decided to migrate the server over to newer hardware before it stopped running, or they finally finished migrating from an old ERP system, and had reached the end of the retention time, for legal purposes, of the old system. I had that, old unloved Netware server, where the only logins in 3 years had been me, looking once a month to see if it was still alive, and to look at if anybody had accessed any of the data. After 5 years it was turned off, with a screensaver that had rolled over the uptime amount for Netware 3.1

[@ChipGuy]

Ahh now I see at 14:25: PCI is 32 and 64 bit. You think it's 16 and 32 bit. Look at around 5:00. It says in the machine "Primary 64 bit PCI Bus 33 MHz" and "Secondary 64 bit PCI Bus 33 MHz"

[@PlaywithJunk]

Yes, you are right! I mixed up 16/32 with 32/64... I must correct that somehow.

[@SergeyVolkov]

Looks like 64 bit PCI slots, not 32 as you said.

[@PlaywithJunk]

Yeah, I corrected it in the description. I mixed up 16/32 with 32/64.... 🙂

[@brianhanson9367]

What function do the pubs on empty slot thingys have

[@PlaywithJunk]

pubs? did you drink beer? 🙂

[@stevaras]

I guess you mean the pcbs on the edge which are actually the processor terminator boards.

[@rossengeorgiew9589]

Am I the only one seeing one beast ngnix web server for free here?

[@vladimirassalukas6726]

the only issue today one must have own nuclear powerplant in order to run it :))

[@PlaywithJunk]

A power outlet in the kilowatt range will do...😉

[@moelassus]

Funny to think that my mobile phone's CPU is significantly more powerful than this electricity hogging beast.

[@Lemon_Inspector]

Calling it "hot-plug" when you have to wait for the power to turn off seems like a little bit of a stretch. Mildly-warm-plug? Lukewarm-plug?

[@PlaywithJunk]

The meaning of hotplug is the server doesn't have to be powered down to replace a PCI adapter. But yes, if you're taking it literally, then it's only residual-heat-plug. 🙂

[@f.k.b.16]

I like how the LCD tells you it's an LCD 🥴

[@Lemon_Inspector]

@@f.k.b.16 It's good at self-promotion.

[@draatman]

this server need to be displace in a mosime it is raillery in wary good condition

[@PlaywithJunk]

it... what?

[@SSGGo_Pro]

BONBJOUR............. En français ok Merci

[@PlaywithJunk]

Bonjour…. pourquoi? Quand? Comment?

[@SSGGo_Pro]

@@PlaywithJunk ben c est TOUJOURS en anglais........... Jamais en Français

[@PlaywithJunk]

@@SSGGo_Pro Je suis desolé mais mon Francais est terrible 🙂

[@SSGGo_Pro]

@@PlaywithJunk 😁😅😂

[@manyachina9388]

хочу

[@PlaywithJunk]

$1000 for transport cost and you can have it....