YouTube Video Review - Supermicro SuperServer SYS-6017TR-TQF Server Build

We've just uploaded our latest YouTube video - a review of a Supermicro SuperServer SYS-6017TR-TQF server solution for a customer of ours.

This system is a full Supermicro SuperServer SYS-6017TR-TQF, which is a fantastic enterprise grade 1U Twin Node, Dual Socket 2011 E5-Xeon enabled rackmount server. The SuperServer is in effect a barebones server solution that is based on the SuperChassis 808BT-1K28B chassis and X9DRT-IBQF Motherboard. It has 4x 3.5" hot-swap bays compatible with SATA and SAS hard drives – Each node in the system has a maximum of 2x bays. The backplane in the chassis uses discrete SATA, of which 2 connections per node connect to the backplane, running at full 6Gbps SATA-III. While the chassis and motherboard can be bought separately, we would not recommend this as they are proprietary components so will not work with alternative cases or boards.

Installed in this server were 4x 1TB Seagate Constellation ES2 SATA III, 7200RPM drives (ST32000645NS). These drives are enterprise grade with this range going from 1TB through to 4TB in disk sizes, 6Gbps SATA interface and 64MB Cache. They have an excellent MTBF and are designed for constant, high IO throughput 24/7. These drives were setup on RAID-1 Mirrored using the onboard SATA RAID controller.

Each node in this system for this customer are running with a Single Intel Xeon E5-2680V2 CPU and 16GB RAM – Made up of 4x 4GB Hynix Validated RAM running at 1866Mhz. Each node board supports dual CPU, but in this install the customer only required one CPU per node. This CPU is the latest V2, so has 10 physical cores with HyperThreading, so will present 20 available cores to a guest OS. This motherboard also has onboard VGA, dual Gigabit, single QDR Inifiband (40Gbps) and a dedicated IPMI Network Interface for remote configuration, monitoring and management of the system. IPMI is a web-based dedicated system on many Supermicro boards (the –F in the model means it has IPMI) that allows any network/Internet connected browsers to access the server securely, and to view status information, but most importantly, allows remote KVM access, so you can control the server as if you were sitting in front of it with a standard keyboard and mouse. This remote KVM functionality works brilliantly and there are no additional licensing costs for this either – You would pay £200+ for this functionality from DELL or HP!

The twin node system uses a single easy-swapped PSU, at 1280W (1.2kW in effect) that is more than sufficient to run both nodes fully populated with the highest-end RAM and CPU’s, as well as all 4 drives installed. There is only a single PSU, so there is no redundancy in this system, but typically this type of system are used in a cluster where 2 node failures at once could be accommodated. The PSU is easily removed though and swapped with a replacement within seconds. It is recommended a replacement PSU is kept as a cold-spare in the event of a failure.

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!