YouTube Video Review - Supermicro SuperChassis 745 Based Dual E5-Xeon DSP Server Build

Published by Richard Parry on 12th Mar 2014

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

This system is a custom build, based on the Supermicro SuperChassis 745TQ-R920B, which is a fantastic tower/4U Rack chassis, along with a Supermicro X9DRI-F Dual Socket 2011 E5-Xeon enabled full size motherboard.

The SuperChassis 745TQ is an excellent mid-range tower/4U enterprise grade chassis. As a barebones chassis it includes a dual 920W PSU (for the R920B model), space for a full size 12” X 13” Extended ATX (EEB) motherboard, has 2x rear 80mm PWM fans, and 3x middle-mounted 80mm PWM fans. All of the fans are hot-swap. The case also has 3x 5.25” bays for optical/tape drives or drive modules, as well as 8x 3.5” SATA/SAS 6Gbps Hot-Swap Bays at the front, located behind a lockable, filtered door.

Installed in this server were 2x 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.

Each system for this customer are running with Dual Intel Xeon E5-2680V2 CPU and 64GB RAM – Made up of 8x 8GB Hynix Validated RAM running at 1866Mhz. 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 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 RAID card used was an LSI 9260-8i SATA/SAS Controller (Supermicro version). This RAID controller was chosen as it is an excellent model for both price, performance and reliability. The RAID card can support a BBU better cache operations and backup support in the event of power-loss. This system is setup with only 2 drives in RAID 1, so the BBU is not required in this instance.

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]