One of the bigger surprises at Computex 2016 for us was the AIC HA202-PH. The AIC HA202-PH is an active-active 2U NVMe system. That means that there are two dual Xeon E5-2600 V4 systems in a 2U. Several vendors have 2 systems in 2U, however, AIC’s solution is unique. It incorporates dual-port NVMe drives to make the high bandwidth, low latency drives available to both nodes. We gave an overview of the new dual-port NVMe drives, and their importance with the introduction of the Intel DC D3700 and D3600 drives. These solutions allow vendors to build high-speed storage systems that can tolerate a controller failure.
As one can see, the AIC HA202-PH has 24 front mounted hot-swap bays. In the rear there are two dual socket LGA2011-3 servers that support E5-2600 V3/ V4 processors.
On an interesting note, since dual port 2.5″ drives are PCIe x2 to each node, a 24x NVMe dual port system only uses 48 of the 80 PCIe 3.0 lanes available in a dual Intel Xeon E5-2600 V3/V4 system. As a result the AIC HA202-PH can also provide 2x PCIe x16 links in each server node.
This is one of the first dual-port NVMe systems we have seen. The dual port NVMe architecture offers a compelling upgrade to legacy dual port SAS architectures.
Think how fast my P2P would run on it?
any links on costs/purchasing one of these chassis? can’t seem to find the AIC chassis anywhere for purchase
Need some info on the statement “As a result the AIC HA202-PH can also provide 2x PCIe x16 links in each server node.”
Does this mean that we can attach downstream storage devices to utilise the unused PCIe lanes coming from the CPU? We could use this for a relative cold tiering system.