I was recently advised to purchase a IBM server for my music download
website.

reasons being is that, they have more memory capacity, very low downtime,
and can be upgraded, without bringing the website off line.
Are IBM servers the best out there for this kind of music application website?.

It sounds like you are describing 'redundancy.' I am sure that any other server, not just IBM offers as little downtime as possible.

Yes, redundancy, and overall performance, given the fact that there will be
millions of music files to be uploaded, and downloaded.

My question still remains, would you recomend IBM servers for a music download, website.

I honestly don't know, as I never bought any kind of server hardware. Try looking for reviews.

Have you looked at the sunfire series of servers?

I will take a look at those machines you mentioned, sunfire series.

I've used IBM, HP, Dell, Compaq (before and after the HP/Compaq merger) as well as assembled my own. I'd put IBM near the bottom of the list, The HP/Compaq Proliant just beat everyone else. It would be a hard choice between them and building my own as they have more advanced manageability features, but dell and ibm and others would be last choices.

I see, any specific reason why you would put IBM,Dell , at the "bottom" of your choice list, as far as servers are concerned?

mixhypnatist.

Out of the 4 I listed, HP and built myself are top, Dell and IBM are bottom. Dell are nothing special, nothing you can't get in a server mainboard from Intel or whomever. IBM's are just a pain, their RSA cards are very limited in what they can do compared to an HP iLO, their Director agent is kind of pointless, doesn't give much more detail than the OS gives. I've had their Servraid mark a whole logical drive as suspect and all IBM can say is backup, reformat and restore. Their web site is annoying to dry to find drivers and such, drill down through page after page of unrelated things. HP's is much easier to find drivers, pick the OS and you get the list of just the latest. HP's Systems Insight Manager is the big plus, you can remotly do just about anything from it across 100's of servers at a time, when you get over a few servers you need the powerful tools like that.

I hear IBM has more memory space,easier to upgrade , and faster operating speeds.Quicker expansion capability,what you say is not what I have been
hearing from programmers.Are you sure what you say is accurate?

I haven't see any of that, they all basically have the same chipsets supporting the same amount of memory

Not necessarily true at all.

Depends on mixhypnatist's budget and specifically what IBM servers he is looking at. He could very well be looking at their PowerPC based servers that run AIX. On the Sun side, he might end up looking at servers with the Chip Multi-Threaded (CMT) T2 running Solaris 10, such as the T5220 or T5240, etc. Given the volume of files he's talking about sharing, the Sun 7000 series storage systems would be worth looking at. They run on Solaris 10 with ZFS, and they use SSD drives for the ZFS write intent log to seriously accelerate file system performance. They've been beating out NetApp for price/performance since they were released.

I've got a T5220 with a J4200 (one of the components of the 7000 series) connected with dual multipathed SAS and 15Krpm drives, and the storage system is just really fast.

I think the comparisons listed by enine are probably based on entry level generic x86 servers, and not the slightly higher end servers (which both IBM and Sun list as what you might call their second tier out of say four). Both build much bigger, much more expensive servers as well (you could drop a quarter million U.S. with either of them pretty easily if you jump to their highest tier systems).

Many programmers I haves spoken to , said that the High end IBM servers,
are superior to all other servers being sold in the market place today.
I hear the memory, and expansion capability, is exceptional and second to
none.!I hear the IBM servers operate with less down time when compared to other servers, and are able to be upgraded, with virtually no server downtime, and have better inter-connective operating features, with regards
to memory, speed, and overall functionality. My question again, are IBM High End Servers, the best out there?.

Not to step on any toes here but...I wouldn't put a lot of faith in a programmers choice of hardware since they're looking at it from a programmers perspective, ie. the guy that doesn't actually FIX or MAINTAIN the hardware. I'd be more inclined to talk to folks that actually install/maintain this kinda stuff. As stated in previous posts, my experience with IBM hardware has been a hassle, particularly when trying to combine it with other manufacturers. It works great when everything you have is IBM. That's just rarely the case for me. I work primarily with HP/Compaq hardware, from small DL360's to multi-rack, clustered systems and we generally have positive results. In most cases though, your budget will determine what kind of hardware you can get, regardless of what you want/like.

I like Sun and Solaris 10. Someone else likes HP. Your programmers like IBM. I'm most familiar with Sun, know a little about the IBM systems, little about HP. That said, most high end servers will have high levels of redundancy and hot swappable hardware. My Sun servers are not particularly high end, but still most of their components are redundant and can be replaced without interrupting the operation of the server. The only exception is the motherboard and cpu. Go up another step in their server line and even those are redundant and hot swappable. Furthermore, a lot of infrastructure is headed towards virtualization with zones, containers, and the ability to shift services around and remove and replace blades and servers without anything ever going down.

hmm. gee. What happened to google mail the other day? Oh well, I guess nothing is ever perfect.