This is something that we have known about for some time, but we finally saw the new Flex ATX Supermicro Xeon D motherboards pop up on Supermicro’s website today. Thank you to an eagle-eyed form member FozzieBear on the catch. Since the original Xeon D motherboards came out in the first half of 2015, we have been stressing to vendors and their product managers/ marketing teams that there is a need for SFP+ and also expanded storage offerings. ASRock Rack has their offerings which we got hands-on time with when we visited them in Taipei in October. For the past few weeks we have heard about the new Supermicro Flex ATX Xeon D offerings and have been extremely excited. We had confirmed earlier this week will have a Flex ATX Xeon D review sample in the lab in the next 2-3 weeks so there is more to come shortly. Today we have the details from the Supermicro site.
Supermicro X10SDV-TP8F
The first motherboard in the release is the lower cost board of the two, the Supermicro X10SDV-TP8F. Here is the nice summary of key features from the website.
One will see that the motherboard has dual 10Gb SFP+ from the Xeon D MAC. There are also 6x 1GbE ports, four from an Intel i350-am4 controller and two from Intel i210 controllers. There are only four SATA 3 ports but there is an Internal Type A header. There is a M.2 connector as well as a mPCIe that supports mSATA. There are also dual PCIe 3.8 x8 slots onboard for even more expansion possibilities. The board uses the 4 core/ 8 thread Intel Xeon D-1518 processor that we have already benchmarked (see Xeon D-1518 benchmarks.)
If you are looking at building a lower cost/ power SFP+ based hyper-converged appliance or a very interesting network appliance, this is certainly going to be a very interesting option in the near future.
Supermicro X10SDV-7TP4F
The second motherboard is one that we are also very excited to see. The Supermicro X10SDV-7TP4F is easily one of the most, if not the most complete Xeon D storage platforms we have seen to date.
First off, the board uses the Intel Xeon D-1537 processor. A 35w TDP part (10w TDP lower than the D-1520 even) that has 8 cores/ 16 threads. In addition to the greater processing power over the D-1518, the X10SDV-7TP4F has a feature set geared towards storage appliances. The motherboard has an onboard 16 port LSI SAS 2116 HBA that supports SATA 3 or SAS 2. Alongside the four onboard SATA ports, M.2 slot, mPCIe slot and dual PCIe x8 slots, one can easily setup a 16x 3.5″ hard drive, 4x SATA III SSD caching and PCIe SSD caching storage system with this board. The board has networking to the tune of dual 10Gb SFP+ Ethernet ports (Xeon D MAC) as well as dual Intel i210 NICs.
Summary
We have been eagerly awaiting these platforms and are happy to get to share them with the STH community today. After talking to vendors, your comments in the STH Forums do help shape future products. We hope to have reviews of these boards coming in the next few weeks.
The X10SDV-7TP4F seems ALMOST perfect for a storage box.
Not sure I’d need the 8 cores though. If the X10SDV-TP8F came with the integrated LSI controller (or at least offered more PCIe slots in lieu of having one so I could install my own) it would be the perfect storage box.
I’d put Napp-IT or FreeNAS on one of those in a heartbeat, if I were shopping for a storage server today.
Finally good motherboards geared to either storage or Network.
The storage mb is looking nice,hoppfully prices will be lower in one or two years for a server upgrade.
SilverStone please make a proper case for this.
For pure storage 4 cores are enough but i guess they thought of virtulization?
When are supermicro going to use solid capacitor?
You need it for ZFS.
What should I know about “Flex ATX”? I don’t see cases that support “flex atx”.
Can these be easily mounted with a fan? Is a fan recommended?
Where are you thinking of mounting a fan?