This week I had a few tidbits that looked interesting related to the new C200 series chip sets for the new Xeons, iSuppli NAND consumption, Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 released to MSDN and Technet subscribers.
I am on a plane from California to London at the moment, so if any exciting news happens today, I will likely miss it. Apologies if this is the case. As a fair warning, Monday and Tuesday may not hold super technical articles on ServeTheHome.com.
Supermicro’s Socket H2/ LGA 1155 Single CPU mATX Sandy Bridge Xeon Motherboards Spied
A quick glance at Supermicro’s site revealed specs posted of their C202 and C204 mATX motherboards for the new Intel Sandy Bridge based Xeon offerings. It looks like there will be support again for the Core i3 (LGA 1155 variants) like there was on the popular X8SIL-F. The C204 boards (X9SCM and X9SCM-F with the “-F” designating IPMI 2.0 capabilities) supports two SATA III 6.0gbps ports and four SATA II 3.0gbps ports much like the current H67 and P67. It also supports two PCIe x8 expansion slots and two PCIe x8 x4 electrical) slots making this a potentially much better storage server board than the X8SIL-F. Both board support the chip set’s Intel 82579LM Gigabit controller and an additional Intel 82574L Gigabit controller. The “-F” variant includes a Realtek management NIC for KVM-over-IP and IPMI 2.0 duties.
On the C202 front, the new mATX offerings are the X9SCL and X8SCL-F which provide six SATA II 3.0gbps ports and feature two PCIe x8 slots with an additional PCIe x8 slot (x4 electrical.) Like the C204 boards, both of the C202 offerings support the Intel 82579LM Gigabit controller and an additional Intel 82574L Gigabit controller. Like the C204 boards the “-F” variant includes a Realtek management NIC for KVM-over-IP and IPMI 2.0 duties.
It is great to see more details of the C20x family emerging.
iSuppli Expects Almost 400% 2010 to 2011 growth in NAND Demand
I saw this bit from iSuppli basically saying that demand for sold state storage is going to explode this year and in the foreseeable future and with year/ year consumption growing at almost 400%. That may seem like a lot, but as someone that uses solid state storage in my iPad, laptops, desktops, servers, iPods and etc., I can see mass adoption happening. What this does mean is that users trying to purchase SSDs for desktops, laptops, and servers will essentially not be buying into a market where there will be a huge supply glut if current trends hold, supporting higher retail prices.
Technet and MSDN Subscribers got Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 to Play With
As mentioned last week, Microsoft Technet and MSDN subscribers got finally got a released Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 to test. Dynamic Memory and RemoteFX are fairly interesting technologies. As a quick note, Dynamic Memory looks like it allows my Hyper-V server to run at 25% less memory than before SP1 so this is a fairly big deal as either it means less hardware for the same workloads (assuming one can take advantage of Dynamic Memory) or a higher virtual machine density on the Hyper-V platform. Either way, this is good news.
