Tyan Transport CX GC68B8036-LE Block Diagram
We could not find a system block diagram, but we found a Tyan S8036 motherboard block diagram:
The key change between our test system that is a -LE variant and the diagram above that can support the 12x 2.5″ NVMe SSD variant (B8036G68AE12HR) is around the bottom where the PCIe x8 connectors and Pericom redrivers are located. These are the unpopulated connectors that we saw near the end of our internal hardware overview.
Tyan Transport CX GC68B8036-LE Management
The Tyan web management interface uses the newer MegaRAC SP-X solution as a base. This is becoming the industry standard management solution that many vendors are adopting and adapting for their platforms.
Tyan’s version has a number of customizations. One item that we surprisingly liked was the simple dashboard. Many vendors use overly complex dashboards with many status indicators but the performance of the dashboard is much worse in those implementations. Tyan’s implementation is relatively fast among SP-X implementations we have used.
One can see features such as sensor readings with temperatures, voltages, fan speeds, power consumption, and other metrics. These sensor readings are displayed on the web interface but are really designed to be consumed by data center monitoring and management packages.
Changing various settings is relatively straightforward. The new HTML5 interface is even easy to navigate on phones and tablets. This is an enormous ease-of-use upgrade versus the last time we looked at the interface in our 2011-era Tyan IPMI 2.0 Remote Management WebGUI Tour.
Remote iKVM features are included with this solution. That is something that vendors such as Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo offer at an additional cost on their servers. Tyan still offers the Java iKVM but now has a HTML5 version in their solution. The HTML5 version we tested does not have remote image mounting enabled, but not all vendors (e.g. Supermicro) have that feature parity on their new HTML5 iKVM suites.
Based on comments in our previous articles, many of our readers have not used a Tyan server and therefore have not seen the management interface. We have a 7-minute video clicking through the interface and doing a quick tour of the Tyan management interface:
It is certainly not the most entertaining subject, however, if you are considering these systems, you may want to know what the web management interface is on each machine and that tour can be helpful.
We also want to note that we confirmed that this system is not using the AMD PSB vendor locking CPU feature. Dell EMC is currently using this in its systems.
From a circular economy standpoint, and re-using CPUs and servers after their initial deployment, we think that Tyan has chosen a more ecologically responsible path than Dell EMC which is vendor locking AMD EPYC CPUs in its systems.
Next, we are going to move onto the performance of the server.
What a mouthful codename
Keep consolidating those E5 v4 nodes. Because of people like you, prices for for E5 v4 systems are finally beginning to drop to reasonable prices on the second hand market. My business is finally able to afford upgrading our E5 v2 servers.
Would love to see how these do in a switchless Azure Stack with the new OS.