Advatronix Cirrus 1200: a Storage Server Under Your Desk
by Johan De Gelas on June 6, 2014 5:00 AM ESTComparison
Below we've summarized the most prominent features of the Advatronix Cirrus 1200, the Dell T320, and Fujitsu TX150-S8 in the table below.
| Cirrus 1200 vs Alternatives | |||||||||
| Cirrus 1200 | Dell T320 | Fujitsu TX150-S8 | |||||||
| Server format |
Non-standard cubic tower |
4U rack or tower | 4U rack or tower | ||||||
| Max. processing power |
Quad-core Xeon E3 2.4 GHz |
10-core Xeon E5-2470 at 2.4 GHZ |
8-core Xeon E5-2450 at 2.1 GHz |
||||||
| Max. RAM capacitiy | 32GB | 96GB | 96GB | ||||||
| Max. Raw HD Storage Capacity |
10 x 4TB (+ 2 x 1TB) |
8 x 4TB | 8 x 4TB | ||||||
| Max. Networking capabilities |
2 x 1GbE 2 x 10 GbE (optional) |
2 x 1 GbE quadport GbE (***) |
2 x 1 GbE quadport GbE (***) | ||||||
| Expansion | 1 PCIe 8x slot(*) | 5 PCIe Slots |
5x PCIe 1x PCI |
||||||
|
Best PSU Redundant? |
400W (Gold) yes |
495W (Platinum) yes |
450W (Platinum) yes |
||||||
| Min. idle power consumption (**) | 89W | <70W | 65W | ||||||
| Price (see below) | $5874 | $5983 | No idea | ||||||
(*) Two taken by standard Adaptec RAID card, one free
(**) According to vendor specifications
(***) You can add more ports by using optional NICs
Both Fujitsu and Dell offer more processing power, as the Xeon E5-24xx is able to offer 8 to 10 cores and much larger L3 caches (up to 20MB instead of 8MB). Combine this with the possibility of up to 96GB of RAM (6 x 16GB), and it is clear that the Dell and Fujitsu can be used as virtual host servers. The Cirrus 1200 is much less suitable for that kind of workload.
The Advatronix specs are clearly favorable when it comes to storage and file serving. It offers an optional 10 GbE NIC while the Dell is stuck at quadport 1 GbE. There are fewer limitations when it comes to using 4TB disks than is the case for Dell and Fujitsu. And you can mix the slow and large capacity 3.5" HDs with 2.5" SSDs; Dell and Fujitsu require you to chose between the two.
Price Comparison
Fujitsu goes the IBM way: it is not transparant about pricing and the focus of the company seems to be on the more expensive servers and not on "industry standard" (x86) servers. Unfortunately, were unable to get pricing details.
Dell thankfully does not let us down. For the Dell configuration we took the following options: Xeon E5-2430L (6 cores at 2 GHz, 60W TDP), the chassis with 8 3.5'' drive bays, the PERC H710p RAID controller, 4 x 8GB ECC DIMMs and 8 x 2TB SATA drivers. We used a low power Xeon E5 to be comparable with the Cirrus 1200's low power Xeon E3. The PERC RAID controller was chosen to be in the same league as the Adaptec 71605 of the Cirrus 1200.
We selected the Cirrus 1200—Windows Server 2012 Standard configuration and added 32GB of ECC RAM for Advatronix. You get slightly less processing power, but the Cirrus 1200 offers you a lot more storage instead. You get 10 standard 2TB drives (instead of 8 in Dell) and two 250GB drives for booting the OS. Considering that Dell charges you $324 per 2TB drive, the Cirrus 1200 is competitively priced.
The Cirrus 1200 has fewer expansion slots, but we doubt that will be a show stopper in most small enterprises. That's especially true when you consider that you can add an optional 10 GbE controller, an option that Dell does not offer.
The biggest advantage of the Dell configuration is the dual SD module (limited to a small 2GB) that can be used to host a VMware ESXi , (Citrix) Xen server, (Redhat) KVM, or Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor. As a result, you save a bit on power (about 12W compared to a RAID-1 SATA configuration) and you get a more robust solution than what is possible with SATA disks.
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Kevin G - Friday, June 6, 2014 - link
It really comes down to scale. A single system, regardless if it is a 4U server or a gaming rig can be run in a home environment and not have to worry too much about cooling. Sure, putting them in a closet with the door closet will cause them to bake but that'd be true of any high power piece of electronics.For a single server, a CRAC is overkill. When dealing with a room with hundreds of racks, each full of servers, a CRAC is necessary to deal with the heat output. CRAC's are also designed with datacenter RAS methodology. They're highly modular to ease service, typically fit into standard rack row and have monitoring capabilities. Multiple CRAC's can also load balance the cooling needs of a room or act has a 'hot spare' in case another unit fails. These are features you don't find in home air conditioning units.
There is also another thing to factor in comparing a gaming rig with server: size. Common servers are either 1U or 2U in height which means they'll use small high RPM fans internally. This means they're loud and there are a lot of them. Cooling for rack servers is done in one direction: front to back. A gaming rig tends to have plenty of room. Larger, lower RPM fans *can* move more air than several smaller 80 mm fans. In addition, the typical gamer case has more area to draw into it as well as for exhaust. In otherwords, a gaming case is less restrict in terms of airflow for cooling.
sciencegey - Saturday, June 7, 2014 - link
It isn't to do with power draw, it's the fact that your PC isn't running 24/7 with loads of HDDs (which create a lot of heat) and the fact that they will be running at around about 60% load constantly. Also, CRAC is just a fancy way of saying air conditioning.Ratman6161 - Friday, June 6, 2014 - link
Ummmmm. If your business relies on this data then it shouldn't be "under your desk".And don't forget your UPS and your offsite backups either. Another issue I see is that a company of a size that might be looking at something like this probably doesn't have any IT support in house to manage those backups and disaster recovery procedures. Unfortunately that's just the sort of situation where I find businesses doing this sort of thing. An amateur sets something up "under his desk" but when it fails they are screwed. Or when that person leaves the company they are screwed.
So there are probably certain niches where this sort of system could be useful but if a company doesn't either have IT staff or at least a support contract to manage things, it's very likely they would be better off in the cloud - if only for disaster recovery purposes.
Gunbuster - Friday, June 6, 2014 - link
The Dell T620 has a chassis option for 32 2.5" Hard Drivesvalinor89 - Friday, June 6, 2014 - link
"Moreover, while renting a few Terrabytes in the cloud has become relatively affordable..."Terrabytes is meant as a joke or a typo? It sounds cool anyway.
rpg1966 - Friday, June 6, 2014 - link
Terrabytes!https://d2kxqxnk1i5o9a.cloudfront.net/uploads/pict...
thunderbird32 - Friday, June 6, 2014 - link
Fujitsu is a weird company. I've never been able to find a reseller that carries their x86 servers or workstations. One wonders how much business they do in that category in the US.JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, June 10, 2014 - link
Thanks for sharing. Each time I went to Cebit, the people at Fujitsu had little interest talking to me, as I was international press. It is like the x86 line is their just to complete their product portfolio.Drizzt321 - Friday, June 6, 2014 - link
I would have liked to have seen an option to ditch the RAID cards and move to simple HBA cards to allow OS management of the arrays. Would also probably decrease the cost by a good bit.sciencegey - Saturday, June 7, 2014 - link
This thing seems kinda pointless because if you are a small business, you can get a cheap server rack and then get a storage server and even have places to put your network switch and VoIP box. This means you won't have to take up precious office space (you can mount server racks on walls) with this giant blue box. If you are really too cheap for a server rack-mount system, then you would probably just build your own file server, which is pretty easy (if you love Linux, make you own distro, use current distros like FreeNAS or shell out to get Windows Server. And if you are using Macs, then you just use a Time Machine/hackintosh as a Time Machine).