IBM System x3400 M2 alert display

The reason your Sata drives are running at 1.5Gb/s vs 3.0Gb/s on your server is because their was a bug in the backplane that caused 30 second freezes under heavy workloads. I have an X3650 which I believe has the same backplane as yours. I'm also running Serveraid 8k.

They found out that the SAS expander that bridges to the Sata devices had a limitation that prevented it from operating at 3.0Gb speeds on SATA II devices. Here is the actual link to the article.

http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/docdisplay?lndocid=MIGR-5071075&brandind=5000008

It really sucks because I spent a lot of money loading up the server with a couple of X25-E SSD drives, only to find out that they're stuck running at SATA1 which not only limits the performance, but cripples IO bandwidth on the HDD itself.

Connect to HMC or ASMI and see what they say. You will get error description there, which may be comprehensible (e.g. a fan died somewhere) or utterly cryptic ("there's no detailed description for error code XXXXX"). If it's not something that you can resolve (e.g. "No AC detected for PSU 1", resolvable by re-plugging a loose cable), then call support.

Anyhow, there is no error code on the LCD display, so it seems that machine is currently happily running.

Edit: Decoding of the panel hieroglyphs:

01 -- Function Code 01. Function description:

1. Display the currently selected initial program load (IPL) type (and logical key mode on some system types).

2. Display the currently selected IPL speed override for the next IPL.

N -- System is booted in normal mode.

V=F -- Boot speed is set to fast.

T -- The firmware is loaded from temporary side.

There's no HMC=x, so your system is not connected to HMC, so you'll have to go to ASMI to see why did it turn the alert LED on.