Supermicro shows eight Nehalems in 2U

SUPERMICRO IS ALWAYS good for the cutting edge of server toys, and here at CeBit the firm is keeping up the tradition. This time, the outfit had a bunch of Nehalem-based goodies and supporting cards to show off.

Screw Spiderman, meet Octo-Nehalem

The first one is quite impressive, eight Nehalems spread across four separate servers in a 2U chassis. Remember those half-U machines that came out from nearly everyone a year or so ago? Now they have stacked two up in a case. It makes you wonder why anyone needs blades, but some people like spending money.

As is usual with Supermicro, the names slide off the tongue, this one has not one but three different but related models, the Superserver 6026TT-BIBQRF, -BIBXRF, and the obvious third choice, -BTRF. They each take 12 DIMMs, 48 per chassis, have a 16x slot, take three hot plug drives, two NICs, and optional infiniband. Nice little, and we mean little, box.

Need SAS 6GB?

The next one is not shipping yet, but will be soon. Eight Nehalems need lots of drive bandwidth, so Supermicro has a card called the UIO SAS2 6G, ironic name for a SAS2 card. They won't say much about it, but we have learned that there is also an embedded version coming really soon. In any case, while Supermicro won't mention the chip vendor, you don't have to look far to figure it out.

Last up is the board we showed you the other day, the cunningly named X8DAH+-(F). This one is a dual Nehalem workstation board, but no one seemed to notice that it had two IO hubs. Yup, notice the heatsinks and count the PCIe slots, there are more there than you can get with a single IOH. If you want a screamingly fast workstation, start with this. µ