STH stopped by the Tyan room at Computex 2016 today. Tyan has a very interesting platforms that they are using for Intel Xeon D based servers. Tyan seems to have a flexible Xeon D platform.
Tyan GT62B-B5539 and TN70J-E3250
Perhaps one of the most interesting solutions Tyan had in their room was a combination of Tyan GT62B-B5539 controller and TN70J-E3250 2U JBOD disk shelf. The Tyan GT62B-B5539 controller is a 1U platform that supports 6x SATA III and up to 4x NVMe devices along with 10GbE networking. The 1U Xeon D based controller connects via SAS to a 12gbps SAS3 JBOD chassis (TN70J-E3250.) The processor was listed at the Intel Xeon D-1541 but we were told additional processors may be available.
This was certainly an interesting implementation of the Xeon D platform that was focused on storage performance. Allowing for 4x NVMe and 6x SATA III in a single 1U chassis is perhaps the highest-end 1U SSD storage configuration we have seen on the Xeon D platform thus far.
Tyan S5539 mATX motherboard
We have seen a number of vendors build higher-end microATX motherboards based on the Intel Xeon D platform. Tyan showed us their Xeon D platform the S5539. We first heard about the Tyan S5539 at our on the Supercomputing 2015 coverage. This was our first opportunity to see the board in person.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the motherboard is the inclusion of two OCP mezzanine slots. One is near the rear I/O panel and is meant for high speed networking OCP mezzanine cards. The second is near the Xeon D SoC and is designed to accept Tyan’s OCP mezzanine form factor storage controllers. These can have, for example, SAS 3008 12gbps SAS 3 mezzanine cards. This is an extremely flexible design.
Final Words
Overall the Tyan Xeon D solutions we saw at Computex 2016 seem extremely flexible. We did ask and the platforms can be customized with different Xeon D SKUs ranging from 4 core to 16 core parts. From what we understand, the Xeon D platforms are BTO so we do not expect them stocked in retail channels unless something changes.
