When we were in Taipei a few weeks ago, we had the opportunity not just to film an upcoming video, but also to see the QC QuantaVault JB4603 along with a few servers that QCT uses for its Ceph storage. Since we had the photos, we figured we would show the 60-bay JBOD that we saw on the trip.
As a quick note, since QCT sponsored the trip for the upcoming video, but we took these photos there so we should call this sponsored.
Checking out QCT QuantaVault JB4603 for Ceph and More
We found this QCT slide on Ceph and high-performance storage that features the QuantaGrid S54S-1U, QuantaVault JB4603, and QuantaGrid D54Q-2U.
The QCT QuantaGrid S54S-1U is a 4th Gen Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids system with a tray of hard drives. Many of our readers use previous generations of this platform. Not only does this 1U hold 12x 3.5″ drives, instead of a normal 1U with 4x 3.5″ drives, but it also has space for four 2.5″ NVMe SSDs.
The other system on that list is the 24x E1.S EDSFF drive QuantaGrid D54Q-2U.
The system that we saw that we wanted to show was the JBOD, the QCT QuantaVault JB4603. This is a 4U JBOD.
In the middle is an interesting LED status array.
The big feature, though, is the 60-bays.
Here is what one of the drive carriers looks like.
The four empty spots are for the SAS expanders. Something different about this chassis is that it is a SAS4 24Gbps per lane chassis.
The back has redundant power supplies and fan modules.
In the center of the system, we have a management module with a management port.
On the back, we can see the 24Gbps SAS external interfaces.
As one would expect, this chassis supports dual paths and things like cascading multiple JBODs together.
Something interesting about this chassis is that it can be configured with this module to either present 60 drives to a single or two hosts (dual path.) It can instead present two sets of 30 drives, or four sets of 15 drives.
While QCT has a number of these options for large-scale Ceph storage, the company also has GRAID SupremeRAID options.
For those who do not know, GRAID uses NVIDIA GPUs tied to its software to handle parity and more. Since it is running on a low-power GPU instead of a traditional x86 processor or a RAID ASIC, it tends to be faster and without some of the additional components, like the BBU, which is also a service item.
Final Words
We do not always get to cover JBOD options, but this one was interesting when we saw it in Taipei. This is just one of the different systems we saw, but we figured it would be a nice change of pace, especially as one of the few SAS4 options out there. SAS4 gives connected storage servers the ability to have faster drive interfaces, but, in a JBOD like this, effectively doubles the per-lane speed of the back-hauls and cascading connections. The QuantaGrid S54S-1U is also extremely popular for Ceph deployments, and the 2U E1.S is really neat as well. QCT sells many storage servers, so we wanted to give at least some idea of what we saw in Taipei a few weeks ago.
