At SC’15 Supermicro released its first series of Intel Omni-Path related products. We covered Omni-Path a few times after an in-depth briefing at IDF 2015 earlier this year including the first photos of switches. Several vendors including Supermicro are releasing products that are Omni-Path enabled, including Supermicro. The company is also releasing 60-bay and 90-bay storage enclosures.
New 60 bay storage server and 90 bay JBOD
The Supermicro SSG-6048R-E1CR60N we heard about some time ago. It has 60 top loading 3.5″ storage bays in the 4U chassis. Just for perspective, the touted Backblaze Storage Pod v5 is still relegated to 45 drives in a 4U making this solution 33% more dense than that media darling. The chassis features an integrated 12.0gbps SAS expander paired with LSI SAS controllers. We are told there is a SAS 3008 and a SAS 3108 version depending on if a customer wants LSI RAID logic or will be using a software solution. Here is what the chassis looks like with the lid open and a hard drive pulled out:
Here is the rear of the unit. We can see redundant power supplies and two 2.5″ spaces for OS/ boot SSDs. This 60 bay server chassis is not a simple JBOD, it includes a full server able to run a storage OS.
One can also see an I/O cutout on the bottom left which we could see used for external IO alongside the expansion slots on the right side. Certainly with the plethora of high speed networking options we have seen lately this could be an extremely interesting Ceph/ Lustre/ Gluster / ZFS node.
The 90 bay storage server The Supermicro SC946ED-R2KJBOD is a dual SAS expander JBOD chassis that enables a high-availability architecture.
Using today’s 6TB drives the 60 bay server can store upwards of 360TB while the 90 bay JBOD chassis can hold 540TB of storage. As disk sizes creep larger into the 10TB+ category, this 90-bay JBOD will have capacity for 1PB in a 4U chassis.
Supermicro Intel Omni-Path Gear
Along with the official release of Intel Omni-Path we have the release of Supermicro gear supporting Omni-Path. Supermicro has an Omni-Path enabled 2U TwinPro2 that includes both the new 100Gbps Intel interconnect but also the Intel Xeon Phi x200 Knight’s Landing processor (SYS-2028TPK-HTR.)
Overall there is a myriad of hardware coming out at SC’15 as the high-performance segments do drive a large portion of the market’s direction. We will hopefully get to test some of this new gear in the coming months.
 storage products and Intel Omni-Path gear){kind=link}
I’m interested to see at what price point the 90 drive chassis is made available at … the current “normal” 45 bay supermicro JBOD can be had for roughly $2000, and the expected pricing I saw for the 90 drive chassis was roughly $9000.
So, more than 4x the price for double the density … depending on your costs for rented racks, it might make sense to stick with the 45 bay chassis – and that’s not to mention the possible headaches of suspending a 90 drive chassis out into open space, on its rails, just to swap one disk.
If it were only double the cost … or maybe $5k … I think we’d seriously consider them.
So 5 years after the budget backblaze storage pod was released they actually think it wasn´t that bad and start to copy it? amazing supermicro
Actually the hardware that comes to mind is even earlier than the back blaze pods which I think were the inspiration for the BB pods.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Fire_X4500
http://web.archive.org/web/20090311021619/http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4500/index.xml
Interesting note about the SSG-6048R-E1CR60N – the 60 bay supermicro JBOD – as of early 2017, they are refusing to sell just the JBOD – supermicro insists on selling it populated with at least 30 drives that you have to purchase from them.
Here is the note on the supermicro page for that item:
“Due to the complexity of integration, this product is sold as completely assembled systems only (with minimum 30 HDDs and 1 NIC or SIOM card).”
… which is, of course, total BS. Something is amiss in the world of supermicro if they are transitioning from a company that just makes good systems to a company that wants to “integrate” and provide “value add”. It’s just a money grab and there is no way we (rsync.net) are going to pay them for their marked up drives.