Arima builds new Opteron bricks

It may look like an ordinary box that can put 100 sockets in a rack, but there are some nice touches here and there. The first thing you see is the front has a full compliment of ports, keyboard, two USB, VGA and two GigE. The front screen can be removed to allow for Infiniband outs as well, but more on that later.

If you have ever tried to debug a balky rack mounted anything, you know having real ports is a plus. If you don't like that, the card just behind the ports is a remote control OPMA card, again, really handy.

To the right of that, there is a full 16x PCIe slot and a single 1x slot. Arima has a riser for this that will allow you to put in a number of PCIe cards, including the Infiniband part I mentioned earlier. If you can fit it in, you can use it, something of a rarity among bricks/blades.

The chipset behind those parts is an Nvidia MCP 55 Pro, and there is an ATI ES1000 on board as well for graphics, but you can't see it. This is pretty standard stuff for an AMD server, the ES1000 is everywhere.

Moving back we get to drives. The NK1244B not only has an IDE port, but it has two SATA ports as well. You can see one of the drives behind the CPU fans, the other slots in below it. Both are 2.5" SATA parts so you could theoretically get 500GB in this brick.

That brings us to the CPU, it is a standard AMD dual core with quads coming whenever Barcelona gets done. The board supports split voltage planes and the BIOS is Barcelona ready so the transition should be a snap. There are also six DIMM slots on the left, DDR2 of course.

Powering it all is a 275W high efficiency (80+%) PSU. There is one power plug per two bricks, so you need five line ins to power all of this. There are three internal fans, two you can see and one behind the PSU, and a few more on the chassis.

Overall, Arima has a nice looking brick with the NK1244B. It has about all you need, lots of memory and the ability to RAID drives. It does what most other blades do, but has a full size PCIe slot as well if you need more. Not a bad package at all. µ