Cisco "new" hardware.
It has two SD card slots, and the machines "BIOS" kind of sort of is located on the SD card, there is one blank partition on it, if one chooses to load an OS on it. The 2nd SD slot is for having a mirror copy.
Nearly all of the machine is configured via a web page. Including RAID card settings. I could not find the "silence alarm" button.
The machine has on board SATA/SAS controller, which is very limited. There is an option to upgrade it to a "mezzanine" card. The mezzanine card will only allow the use of 8 drives and is not supposed to be used with any other RAID cards. This particular customer changed their mind on the purpose of the machine to where it needs more drives. So Cisco UCS-9266 (made by LSI Logic) was ordered. For whatever reason Cisco was rather specific in that if it is in a 2 CPU system the card goes in slot 4, and slot 3 in a single CPU system.
This UCS-9266 card has two ports on it, the backplane has four ports on it. It will not recognize any drives beyond 12. There is other cables offered by Cisco a UCSC-6, UCSC-4, and UCSC-2; I was unable to discover what the differences between the cables is, nor find a picture. I am also unsure what the machine came with. Apparently Cisco ships these machines with one of two different back planes for the hard drives, and to use the UCS-9266 we needed the other one. Supposedly the UCS-9271 will work as it has 8 ports.
Another point of interest: when ordering, keep in mind if one is getting a 16 drive capable system or a 24 drive system. On the 16 drive system, the last 8 slots for hard drives do not have SAS/SATA connectors, despite there being drive blanks there. Cisco will not sell the parts to convert a 16 drive system into a 24 drive.
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