I hear IBM servers provide terabytes of memory space, and that they are able to be clustered
togeather, to create supercomputer type features. This is the info I obtained from their website.

I hear an IBM X3550, server, just got rave reviews at a "Linux magazine"
online. The best server he ever tested, didn't want to return it to IBM
after the test,because it ran so good.!Check out the review.

Yup. You'll find reviews like that. That is one of their entry level X86 servers. The specs on that server (it's max this or that) don't measure up to my T5220 or the IBM PowerPC servers.

I don't much go for magazine reviews. I'd rather see practicing sysadmins in the trenches relating their experiences.

Here's one for you. I have a Sun E250 (they EOL'd quite a while ago). Actually I have about 7 of them still in operation, and about 7 more that I snagged when other departments decommissioned them, so that I could have spare parts. One of my E250's that was bought maybe 10 years ago, and is still running as a departmental server with original parts and drives (we've added an external drive array, a tape library, a dual ultra320 SCSI card, and a dual GigE card), came up with a service light today. Checking indicators and scanning /var/adm/messages indicated that power supply 1 had failed. Server still running. I went down to our storage room, pulled a power supply from one of the spare machines, brought it up and swapped it out. Service light went off. Everything's fine. Server running without interruption. That's the first replacement part in 10 years.

That department happens to be on a tight budget and couldn't upgrade when we shifted a couple of other departments to T5220's. On the other hand, that 10 year old server still handles the department web site, mail server, samba shares, printer sharing, ftp services, license manager for the labs, and so on for hundreds of students and faculty.

For a music download site your not going to need a high end server, those types of sites if you want availability you use multiple small servers (1U pizza box) and a back end nas/san.

Generally squeaking programmers know very little about hardware in general and high end servers in particular. Sysadmins with experience of running high end servers are a better source of information, especially sysadmins with recent experience of setting hardware strategy for large high-availability servers in which they should (TM) have done in-depth analysis including access to expensive paid-for industry analysis reports.

I support MS windows servers, programmers are always doing things like using mapped drives then wondering why their app won't run as a service, or creating shares that have everyone full permissions, or their app always needs full admin rights.

It might help to specify what you do need. What sort of connection will you have with the website users and so what sort of maximum data rate do you need to serve? Slow single disks will serve at least 10 MBps which equates to 100 Mbps by the time you've added overheads.

If what you need is essentially a file server then you need very little CPU power and memory.

Unless you are serving over Gigabit LAN or have a very high speed Internet connection these are not high end requirements and you are looking for a low end system with very high availability in which case a cluster of low end servers around a high-availability NAS/SAN (as already suggested by enine) is all you need.

Cute. I like that.

I will need to download many thousands of music files.What IBM server would you recomend?.

Mixhypnatist.

"I will need to download many thousands of music files" is not a sufficient specification to recommend a server. What about the capacity of the connection you will be downloading over?

I don't know enough about IBM servers to recommend one; I'm only trying to help you to give essential information when asking for recommendations.

You need to download, or your customers/clients need to download from you? How frequently and how many users? Translate that into storage capacity, number of downloads per day, volume of data being downloaded per day, other related connections, etc. Is there a store front? What's the rest of your infrastructure and your internet connection speeds? Don't worry about talking too much. Fill in the details. (Your budget is also a significant point.)

Yes, will have a storefront, with shopping cart.The customers will be downloading the files from the website, after they pay at a SSL credit card payment page.Music files may be Mp3 or wave.

Don't buy any server use a service provider like akamai or amazon like itune does then when you know what your needs are you can build your own infrastructure and then you will know what kind of server you have to buy.

You really don't want to get into credit card sales on your own server unless you really know what you are doing. There are legal liability issues that are serious. This has become more so in the U.S. as both states and the federal government have passed laws concerning exposure of personal and credit card data should your systems ever be hacked. You should ask a company lawyer for advice if necessary. There are credit card processing companies that you can sign up with. You pass off the processing to them, they pass back a code that it was completed, and so on.

You still haven't answered anything about expected storage requirements, traffic levels, volume of downloads, budget, or anything else like that. But, it seems you may have some bigger issues that need to be resolved. Business plans, if that's what you're getting into, generally require an enormous amount of detail spelled out up front. We're having trouble getting more than a couple of sentences out of you.

I will be utilizing "RAID" storage system, realtime hardware or virutal.
You are not getting a lot of details out of me becuase the website is still under construction, and I have no Idea as to what kind of volume I may
get from potential consumers.So, I can not answer all of your questions.
I do appreciate, and value the info, and advice I have received from you all, and will use your advice, in accordance to what I expericence in the future. Any more suggestions, with regards to a music download website.?