14 DAY TRIAL // AVADirect has just announced that the company has started selling the high-performance Supermicro SC847A enterprise storage solution that can support up to 36 SATA or SAS storage drives inside its 4U form-factor chassis.
The system is based on Supermicro’s X8DTU-F motherboard which packs the Intel 5520 series chipset, supporting all of the company’s LGA 1366 socket processors.
The list of available CPUs includes both quad-core and six-core parts, the fastest of these being the 3.45GHz Xeon-5690.
AVADirect’s customers can pair the Intel processors with either a 3Ware or LSI RAID controller (two will be required as these cards support between 16 and 24 ports) to deliver the RAID or storage connectivity required to the drives installed.
The maximum amount of RAM that is supported is set at 196GB and the system can also be configured to feature a high-end graphics card for rendering work.
Setup in this manner, Supermicro’s SC847A system can “only” support 24 storage drives.
The rest of the configuration includes a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports, driven by an Intel 82576 controller, one dedicated LAN port for IPMI remote management, and redundant 14000W 80Plus Gold power supplies.
All of these are housed inside a rack mountable 4U chassis and are cooled by seven 80mm heavy-duty fans. Supermicro's Enterprise Storage solution is APM 1.2 and ACPI 1.0 / 2.0 compliant.
The Supermicro SC847A is available right now for purchase with prices starting at $5,788.44 (about 4,450 EUR) for the basic configuration that includes a pair of Intel quad-core Xeon CPUs, 24GB of RAM and two 3WARE SAS 9750 RAIS controllers.
The server comes configured with a single SATA hard drive, but AVADirect also retails a wide selection of SAS and SATA HDDs from manufacturers such as Hitachi, Seagate, Samsung or Western Digital.