YouTube Video Review - Supermicro E5-Xeon Storage Server Build

We've just uploaded our latest YouTube video - a review of a Supermicro based server solution for a customer of ours.

This is the first system of many for a large SAN based system. It was designed with premium components to provide a high uptime, reliable and fast system.

The bases for this system is a Supermicro SuperChassis 216BA-R920LPB server chassis. The customer chose this chassis as it is 2U in height, accepts full size motherboards, has excellent cooling and has 24x front mounted 2.5” SAS/SATA bays, plus an option for 2x 2.5” rear SAS/SATA drives. The chassis also has a redundant (2x modules) 920W 80plus Gold Power Supply.

Within the system is quite an array of drives. The system is to be used with Linux and the ZFS File System. This particular system has 16x Seagate Constellation 1TB SAS Drives (6Gbps, 7200RPM) 2.5” hard drives for data storage, 2x Kingston V300 60GB SSD’s and 2x Crucial M500 240GB SSD’s. At the front the hard drives and Crucial SSD’s were installed. At the rear are the 2x Kingston SSD’s for the boot/OS.

The data drives (Kingston SSD’s and Seagate Constellations) are all driven off 3x LSI 9207-8i HBA’s. As the customer is using ZFS there is no need for an actual hardware RAID controller, as the file system is handled by the processor.  The backplane in the chassis is the non-expander version, as the customer wanted full wire-speed data throughput on all installed drives. We also sell an expander version of this chassis, which has a single MiniSAS connector, the SuperChassis 216BE16.

At the heart of all of this is a Supermicro X9SRL-F motherboard. This is a single socket 2011, E5 Xeon CPU capable motherboard. It was chosen as the customer wanted a cost-effective Socket 2011 board compatible with the latest E5-2620 V2 6-core Ivy Bridge CPU’s, which was installed in this system. Coupled with this CPU are 4x sticks of 8GB Hynix PC3-12800 (1600MHz) ECC Registered RAM. The E5-2600 series CPU’s are quad memory channel capable, so it is always recommended to install 4 or more memory modules in a system of this type for optimal performance.

All of the products seen in the video review are available on our site to purchase individually, however if you would like to talk with us about a custom server configuration please call us on 0800 652 1649 or email us on [email protected]

Check out the video here!