AVADirect's Supermicro Westmere-EX 8-Way Xeon Superserver is Super
AVADirect's Supermicro Westmere-EX 8-Way Xeon Superserver is Super
Posted 06/09/2011 at 6:37am
| by Paul Lilly
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If you're into the server scene, and in particular have a fetish for Supermicro Superservers, go ahead and cue the Tim Allen man grunt now. AVADirect, custom builders of high-end gaming desktops, notebooks, and workstations, just "added a whole new animal" to its server lineup based on Intel's socket 1366 Xeon Westmere-EX processors.
AVADirect's Supermicro Westmere-EX 8-way Xeon Superserver is a 5U rack system with support for Intel's 8-core Xeon 7500 family and 10-core E7-8800 family of processors. There are 64 DIMM slots that support 16GB DDR3 for a total of up to 2TB of ECC memory. Storage duties come courtesy of 16 hard drive bays, or up to 24 2.5-inch HDDs with the optional HDD module.
Other specs include six SATA II ports onboard, four PCI-E x16 + PCI-E x8, or 10 PCI-E x8 full-height, full-length slots, onboard BMC with support for IPMI 2.0 + KVM with dedicated LAN, six 9cm hot-swappable fans, and a 2800W redundant power supply.
Monsters don't come cheap, and pricing for this beast starts at around $18,500.
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bubinasuit
June 10, 2011 at 10:47pm
Just for shits and giggles, I maxed out every option given to you on the ava page, then i threw in 8.4 TB of sdd (still from ava).
The total cost, $186 076.85
Virgnarus
June 09, 2011 at 8:29am
Recently went into the foray of rack servers and have not been familiar with brand names for barebones, so I've been initially skeptical with Supermicro. However I've generally heard very positive reviews on their stuff so I decided to dive in. I am very satisfied with the purchase. Bought a 2U barebones and stuffed it with the best stuff a $3000 budget can offer, and it hasn't suffered a hitch once. My only issue is that I've yet to find linux drivers that can properly read their proprietary chipsets, but the only snag from this is that I can't read any temp sensors (not like you can OC with a Xeon mobo anyways).
Also, I don't understand the whole noise problem with rack servers. They're designed to be in high-noise locations, so while this puppy did sound like a jet when turned on, it mysteriously went silent amongst the rest of servers in our data center.
Neufeldt2002
June 09, 2011 at 8:03am
Paul, in the second paragraph I believe that the "or" in this sentence should be "of".
"There are 64 DIMM slots that support 16GB DDR3 for a total of up to 2TB or ECC memory"
Otherwise, I wish I could afford this server for home use.
praetor_alpha
June 09, 2011 at 6:55am
Might want to throw in some earplugs too. Rack servers are NOT designed to be quiet.
Bad-Karma
June 09, 2011 at 11:39pm
Yeah, the noise can get to be unbearable. However, if you're willing to throw some money at it then you can switch out most of the case & CPU fans to get the noise down. I have a few Norco and Istar rack cases that are in the same room with my gaming rig. Once modded they aren't hardly noticable. But those are homebuilt. A vendor machines don't leave a whole lot of options.
The majority of the noise usually comes from the stock CPU fans on the Xeons & Opterons. And its hard to find decent and or quiet CPU coolers/fans unless your case is 3u and up.
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