Advatronix Cirrus 1200: a Storage Server Under Your Desk

The 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.