A Closer Look
From the first server that we’ve tested for Supermicro to this one the packaging is bar none.
Here is a closer look at one of the “blades” taken apart. We would like to mention that these units are upgradable without having to go and upgrade the whole classis. So if you slowly want to upgrade to faster processors, you have that option. It is also agnostic to whatever brand of processor you may choose. You can even run AMD and Intel in the same chassis.
Each one of the blades is pretty simple; 5 peices all together including Blade chassis, Back plate, Motherboard, Mainboard to Backplane connector, and spacer for the Mainboard to Backplane connector.
Here is a complete mainboard overlook with12 DDR3 DIMM’s and dual LGA1336 sockets.
This is a picture of the BIOS. If you need to replace your BIOS for a future revision of processors (6 cores) it’s easy to get to, quick and painless to replace.
Here we have the Mellanox ConnectX Infiniband 40Gbps controller, and utilizing the industry standard QSFP connector.
Pictured here, the Nuvoton is the IPMI Controller. This allows you full KVM over IP, monitoring, and full power control of your server.
We wanted to take this picture to show the voltage regulators. We think these mainboards are only 12v based, but we could be wrong.
Here is the connector that delivers power to the mainboard, and SATA connections to the backplane.
Intel ICH10R Chipset
Intel IOH-36D Chipset (Tylersburg 5520)
From top to bottom left to right: IPMI Port, 2 USB ports, 2 Intel GbE ports, 1 Serial Port, 1 VGA port, Mellanox 40Gbps Connector
We wanted to show the hot-swap ability of the back end of this part. Both power supplies are hot-swap, and all 4 nodes are hot-swapable. The cool thing about this is you can remove one node without taking down the other 3 nodes. So if you have a single server failure, you can just remove the problem node.
This is the backplane that each one of the blades connect into. We suspect that the bottom half is 12v, and top half is SATA for the 3 drives in the front.
Let’s start the build on this. It’s definitely one of the best parts of the whole review!
Great review, would love to see the images as none are showing up on the post.
We are actually looking at these units as our next purchase.
Thanks again for the detailed review.