Gigabyte is entering the double-sided storage server market with the Gigabyte S451-3R0. The Gigabyte S451-3R0 has 36x 3.5″ storage bays that are accessible without having to pull the chassis out from the rack as one would do with top loading designs. This means less rack disturbance than with top loading designs but the 36-bay has another advantage: it has more expansion options than most top loading designs.
Gigabyte S451-3R0 Features
The front of the Gigabyte S451-3R0 is dominated by 24x 3.5″ bays. This is a traditional layout we typically see in 4U 24-bay chassis.
The rear of the unit has 2U of 12x 3.5″ bays for 36 in total. While the top of the unit looks like a typical 2U server. There are redundant power supplies and 2x 2.5″ bays for SATA hot swap drives. These dual drives are generally used for OS boot or caching.
Inside there is a standard motherboard based on Intel Xeon Scalable. That design has dual processors along with 16x DIMM slots with 8 per CPU and 6 memory channels per CPU.
For standard networking, one gets dual 1GbE ports and dual 10GbE SFP+ ports. For many disk-based storage options that is all that is needed. If one wants to add more networking or SAS storage controllers there are four PCIe 3.0 x16 slots and an OCP Gen3 x16 mezzanine slot. Typical higher-density storage designs sacrifice motherboard area and therefore expansion options for allocating more volume to 3.5″ media. The 36-bay design allows for greater expansion capabilities.
The space savings can be significant. Not all racks can accommodate the 60-bay and larger top loading units. As a result, the 36-bay storage server offers 2U of space savings over using a 2U/ 4U storage server and a 4U/ 2U disk shelf.
Learn more about the Gigabyte S451-3R0 here.
While 4 PCIe+1 OCP x16 slots are a definite plus, having only 16 DIMMs and storage density of 9HDD/U aren’t impressive (unless server depth is limited to 25-26″)