Advatronix Cirrus 1200: a Storage Server Under Your Desk
by Johan De Gelas on June 6, 2014 5:00 AM ESTThe Competition
We searched the market for worthy competitors. There are only a few options if you want a low noise office server, as most solutions are now "in the cloud" and the market for tower models has dwindled significantly. There are some classic tower servers that are reasonably low noise, but many have limited and low performance storage capabilities. They are meant to be cheap servers, not storage monsters. A good example is Dell's T110 II, which is also based on the Xeon E3 platform; it can only take four 3.5'' disks.
The best alternative seems to be "high-end" versions of the low noise Dell T320 tower server. The base configuration consists of a pretty lousy storage system (low-end software RAID chip, 4 SATA drives), but you can upgrade it quite extensively. According to our colleagues, the T320 is quiet and needs very little energy. Still, the T320 is limited to eight 3.5" drive bays and the best RAID-controller is the PERC H710p. The latter is based on a dual-core LSISAS2208 ROC (dual-core Power at 0.8 GHz), which is a mid-range RAID chip.
One way to increase the capacity and RAID capabilities of the T320 is to use 2.5" bays. In that case you can increase the total number of drives to 16. Still, there are some advantages to using 3.5" disks: higher capacities, slightly better performance, and lower cost. (And 2.5" SSDs are always an option if you need high performance storage.)
While the Dell PowerEdge T320 is not in the same storage league as the Advatronix Cirrus 1200, it has an edge over the latter when it comes to memory. The Dell uses the slightly more powerful Xeon E5-2400 (single socket) and as result can realisticaly use up to 96GB RAM (192GB if you use expensive 32GB DIMMs).
Another possibility is the Fujitsu Primergy TX-150 S8. Fujitsu focused on keeping the noise low and claims that even with SAS drives, the noise pressure can stay below 30 dB(A) at idle. The configuration is very similar to Dell, with the exception of the legacy PCI slot.
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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).