Advatronix Cirrus 1200: a Storage Server Under Your Desk
by Johan De Gelas on June 6, 2014 5:00 AM ESTBenchmark Configuration
When we look at the market of competing tower servers, almost all of them use some form of LSI RAID chip. In the low-end and midrange server market, the slightly older (2012) but mature dual-core LSI 2208 chip is by far the most popular solution. Most tower servers also ship with a Xeon E5, so we wanted our Cirrus 1200 configuration to reflect that. However, most tower servers have fewer disks bays. In a nutshell, the typical competing tower has a faster CPU, eight 3.5" diskbays, and a dual-core LSI RAID chip. So we wanted our competing configuration to reflect that.
We converted the components of our Supermicro 2U 6027R-73DARF into a tower server and inserted an LSI MegaRAID 9265-8i. The LSI MegaRAID 9265-8i is not the latest LSI controller, but it uses an LSI 2208 RAID-on-Chip (RoC). This RoC is a dual-core PowerPC at 800 MHz with a 1333 MHz DDR3 interface.
Supermicro 6027R-73DARF
| CPU | One Intel Xeon E5-2680 v2 (2.8GHz, 10c, 25MB L3, 95W) |
| RAM | Up to 64GB (8x8GB) DDR3-1600 Samsung M393B1K70DH0-CK0 |
| Internal Disks |
2 x Seagate NAS HDD ST4000VN000 4TB (RAID-1) 4 Seagate NAS HDD ST4000VN000 4TB (RAID-10) 2 x Intel SSD710 200GB (RAID-1) |
| Motherboard | Supermicro X9DRD-7LN4F |
| Chipset | Intel C602J |
| BIOS version | R 3.0a (December the 6th, 2013) |
| PSU | Supermicro 740W PWS-741P-1R (80+ Platinum) |
We enabled CacheCade and Fastpath.
The disk caches are of course disabled. The two disks in RAID-1 house the OS and the database logs. We use only four drives for the data of our SQL Server database. The reason is is so we can measure whether the Cirrus 1200 (with 12 + 6 disks bays) has an advantage in our workload over a typical tower server that comes with 8 disks bays.
Advatronix Cirrus 1200
We use an eight drive setup in RAID-10 for our data; this way we can also have hotspare disk.
| CPU | One Xeon E3-1260L (2.4 GHz, 4C, 8MB L3, 45W TDP) |
| RAM | 32GB (4x8GB) DDR3-1600 Samsung M393B1K70DH0-CK0 |
| Storage system |
Adaptec ASR71605Q with "MaxCache" and BBU Enabled 2x Seagate NAS HDD ST4000VN000 4TB (RAID-1) 8 Seagate NAS HDD ST4000VN000 4TB (RAID-10) 2x Intel SSD710 200GB (RAID-1) |
| Motherboard | Supermicro X9SCL |
| Chipset | Intel C204 |
| BIOS version | v2.10 |
| PSU | One Athena Power 500W AP-RRMUD6508 (80 Plus) |
Avatronix uses the Adaptec ASR71605Q, which is based on the MIPS 1004k with 2 cores at 1 GHz. The two disks in RAID-1 house the OS and the database logs. The heavy duty SQL Server 2012 database is located on the eight disk RAIDset. The two Intel SSD710 are used as "Maxcache", Adaptec nomenclature for an SSD cache. We could have given the Cirrus 1200 more SSDs (up to six), but it would increase the cost significantly and there is no reason why adding more SSDs would help in our specific benchmarks. We tested with up to 1024 connections requesting a transaction every 100 ms, which is a very high load for such a small business server, but it's still unlikely to overwhelm our SSD cache.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
39 Comments
View All Comments
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).