YouTube Video Review - Supermicro SuperServer 7047 Server Build

We've just uploaded our latest YouTube video - a review of a Supermicro based server solution for a customer of ours.

This system is for a customer in the UK that was looking for a new server to run their entire office. Their requirements was for a high-end system, built using Enterprise grade components and for use as their primary office server. The server would run with Windows 2012, for both file server, Active Directory and most importantly, Microsoft Exchange.

The bases for this system is a Supermicro SuperServer 7047R-72RF server system. We chose this chassis as the customer wanted a tower, but rack capable system to accept dual E5-Xeon CPU’s, plenty of RAM expansion, 8x hot-swap 3.5” drive trays and redundant power supplies. This SuperServer includes all of this as standard. This SuperServer is based around the Supermicro SuperChassis CSE-745TQ-R920B.

Within the system is a myriad of quality hard drives and SSD’s, all of which are high end Enterprise grade. Installed in this system were 2x 480GB CloudSpeed1000 SSD’s setup in RAID 1 mirroring. These SSD’s are used for the OS. For the data drives we used Toshiba’s latest 4TB Enterprise hard drives. These are standard 3.5” Hard Drives, but are excellent quality SATA drives designed for long-term use with a high MTBF. These drives were setup in a RAID 5 configuration and designed for data storage. In RAID 5 this gives 12TB of gross disk space. For the Exchange data we opted for 2x 500GB Western Digital RE4 Enterprise drives. These two drives were setup in RAID 1 mirrored.

All of these drives were connected to the onboard LSI 2208 RAID Controller. This controller while onboard, is a full LSI hardware RAID controller. The motherboard has 2x 6Gbps MiniSAS (8087) connectors, which go directly to the SGPIO enabled SATA/SAS 6Gbps backplane on the chassis. The cabling for all of this is included with the SuperServer itself – all installed pre-cabled.

At the heart of all of this is a Supermicro X9DRH-7F motherboard. This is a dual socket 2011, E5 Xeon CPU motherboard. This board in conjunction with this SuperServer was chosen as the customer wanted to use dual CPU in their system and while only wanted 64GB to start with, wanted to be able to expand this in the future. This particular board supports 1TB of ECC Registered RAM – plenty for even the most demanding of systems! Additional features of this board include dual Gigabit Ethernet, dedicated IPMI Interface (Remote KVM) and 4x full height PCI-E 8x Slots.

Installed on this board were 8x sticks of Hynix 8GB ECC Registered RAM. Due to the quad memory path feature of the E5-2600 V2 Series CPU’s it is recommended to install 4 sticks of RAM for each CPU.

The CPU’s chosen for this installation were 6-core Intel E5-2630 V2’s – which are 6-core CPU’s running at 2.6Ghz per core. These are the latest generation of Intel E5 CPU’s, available on the market around 5 months ago. These 6 core CPU’s support 12 threads too, so on this system that’s 24 available computing “cores” as seen in Windows – plenty for a single server such as this.

All of this is powered by dual redundant 920W 80 plus Platinum (94%+) Power efficient PSU’s. When we were testing this running Windows 2012 (and above hardware specifications) the system was only drawing 150W of power (at UK 240AC). That’s very efficient!

To keep this cool are 5x hot-swap 80mm fans – 3x at the front directly behind the front hot-swap bay area, and 2x at the rear. These are PWM and driven off the motherboard. What’s great is these fans are beefy, but they’re wolf in sheep’s clothing – They run extremely quiet under normal load – and you can barely tell the system is on in a normal office environment. When the system needs to work harder and generates more heat these fans will speed up (up to 7,000 RPM) so will get much louder. We barely noticed the system getting louder. It is an ideal system for an office or datacentre alike.

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!