The Truth About White-Box Servers

White-box equipment and storage technology have been evolving at an alarming rate in recent years, and Supermicro's SuperServer 7044H-32R reflects that progress. This bare-bones server will accept two dual-core 64-bit Xeon processors and can be configured for tower or rack-mount use. It also offers state-of-the-art storage along with redundant power and cooling features. The SuperServer 7044H-32R is based on Supermicro's X6DH3-G2 server board, which includes an Adaptec 9410W SAS controller and eight SAS/SATA connectors that operate at 3 Gbps. Supermicro then installs an all-in-one (SAS, SATA and SCSI) Zero-Channel RAID (ZCR) card in a PCI-X slot. ZCR cards add advanced RAID functionality to a system's on-board SCSI. In the case of the 7044H-32R server, the ZCR card adds RAID5 hot-swap capability to the main board's integrated RAID0/RAID1 functionality. ZCR cards have no drive connectors and instead use the ones on the main board.

The server offers integrated Serial Attached SCSI, or SAS connectivity. SAS continues the progress of SCSI technology in much the same way as Serial ATA (SATA) has taken the spotlight away from parallel ATA. SAS offers 3-Gbps throughput per port, which is more than four times the bandwidth of SCSI. SAS offers eight ports per controller and can scale to up to 128 devices on a single controller, compared with parallel SCSI's maximum of 16 drives per controller. Because SAS is compatible with SATA, high-performance SAS drives can be combined with low-cost SATA drives on the same backplane. This allows for more versatile and cost-effective storage configurations.

SCSI Enclosure Services 2, or SES2, also is offered in the SuperServer 7044H-32R. SES2 provides health and monitoring information for SAS drives. SES2 has alarms and alerts for drive, temperature and fan failures. The server's cooling system consists of four hot-swappable cooling fans and two hot-swappable rear exhaust fans. The redundant cooling system lets the server run at full speed even if one of the fans should fail. Three 760-watt hot-swap power supplies keep the server running at all times. Other safety measures include monitoring of the CPU cores, fan status, internal temperature and chassis intrusion.

A bare-bones version of the SuperServer 7044H-32R costs less than $1,500. Making the system functional requires the addition of one or two Xeon processors and passive copper heat sinks, at least two DDRII 400MHz memory DIMMs and at least one 3.5-inch SAS or SATA hard drive. The Xeon processors will support both 64-bit and 32-bit operating systems. A dual-channel memory bus supports up to 16 Gbytes of ECC DDRII 400 SDRAM in eight DIMM sockets. Graphics processing is handled by an ATI Rage XL PCI video controller with 8 Mbytes of video memory. Ports include dual Gigabit Ethernet, four USB 2.0 ports, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, one serial port and one parallel port. Expansion slots include one 64-bit 133MHz PCI-X, two 64-bit 100MHz PCI-X, two PCI-Express x8 and one legacy PCI.