Supermicro Xeon-D X10SDV-7TP4F

[jgreco]

Managed to get one of these a few weeks ago, but never found time to play with it until just recently.

The X10SDV-7TP4F is a Xeon D-1537 storage optimized platform, sporting an LSI 2116 controller with 16 IT ports presented as SFF-8643 (high density 4 lane) , two Intel 1Gbps, and two SFP+ 10Gbps ports on a tiny little board that can take up to 128GB of RAM.


Geekbench around 15000.

With two 32GB RDIMM's and no other accessories, it is idling around 37 watts when powered by a 480 watt platinum PSU (PWS-441P-1H).

Retail cost is probably around $900, which isn't totally unreasonable if you sum up the cost of an equivalent Skylake E3 system decked out with a 16 port HBA and dual 10GbE.

It's pretty intriguing but it isn't quite blowing me away. More details as I play with it.

 

[jgreco]

The 10G seems to work with FreeNAS 9.10, or, at least, I can configure a port, get link, and ping. That's very promising. I haven't actually set up enough of a system to do an install though.

Also, the system seems to be idling around 47 watts while in FreeNAS, changing hw.acpi.cpu.cx_lowest from C1 to C2 got that under control.

 

[Stephen2]

Nice hardware...

 

[jgreco]

In general, yes. I guess I'd prefer the higher clock speeds I'm used to. Here, this is destined to become a hypervisor, probably with a FreeNAS VM, and if I like it, there's a very good possibility of replacing some other systems too.

We have some other E5-1650v3 hypervisors that are good performers, but at about 170 watts idle, they're a bit too power hungry. I'd love to get to about half that, and a 37 watt platform looks like it would be a big part of that.

 

[BigDave]

In general, yes. I guess I'd prefer the higher clock speeds I'm used to. Here, this is destined to become a hypervisor, probably with a FreeNAS VM, and if I like it, there's a very good possibility of replacing some other systems too.

We have some other E5-1650v3 hypervisors that are good performers, but at about 170 watts idle, they're a bit too power hungry. I'd love to get to about half that, and a 37 watt platform looks like it would be a big part of that.

I'm looking forward to seeing the power math (savings) going forward, your projects are always interesting...

 

[jgreco]

It's promising, so far. The big thing that's going to be a problem is that Supermicro doesn't really make the chassis I'd want (SC213 or 216) with the power supply that I'd prefer. See, the goal would be to stick a RAID controller on there and a second pair of 10G ethernets. That bring us to hovering-around-62-watts, for a platform that can directly drive 4 10G, 8 RAID ports for datastore storage, and then 16 HBA ports for passthru to a FreeNAS VM.

Adding ~16 4TB 2.5" HDD for the FreeNAS (2W each) and some SSD/HDD for the ESXi datastores should probably bring us to just a little over 100 watts, but I'm kinda concerned since the PSU's that are offered on those chassis don't really mesh too well. The 920SQ would be the ideal noise-reduced unit but an 1800 watt PSU operating on a 100W system won't be in its efficiency zone.

 

[BigDave]

It's promising, so far. The big thing that's going to be a problem is that Supermicro doesn't really make the chassis I'd want (SC213 or 216) with the power supply that I'd prefer. See, the goal would be to stick a RAID controller on there and a second pair of 10G ethernets. That bring us to hovering-around-62-watts, for a platform that can directly drive 4 10G, 8 RAID ports for datastore storage, and then 16 HBA ports for passthru to a FreeNAS VM.

Adding ~16 4TB 2.5" HDD for the FreeNAS (2W each) and some SSD/HDD for the ESXi datastores should probably bring us to just a little over 100 watts, but I'm kinda concerned since the PSU's that are offered on those chassis don't really mesh too well. The 920SQ would be the ideal noise-reduced unit but an 1800 watt PSU operating on a 100W system won't be in its efficiency zone.

I see what you are talking about :(

Have you considered starting a dialog with them?

 

[jgreco]

I see what you are talking about :(

Have you considered starting a dialog with them?

They seemed confused enough when I tried to find out when these were going to become available.

Maybe I can hack around this. Hmm. *has crazy idea*

 

[BigDave]

Maybe I can hack around this. Hmm. *has crazy idea*

"The Grinch smiled evilly as he fired up his soldering station."

 

[jgreco]

"The Grinch smiled evilly as he fired up his soldering station."

Almost. I just offlined the SC216 VM storage server a few days ago, I could pull it over to the bench and borrow its PSU's... about as close as I can get to buying the 216 I'd want.

 

[BigDave]

Almost. I just offlined the SC216 VM storage server a few days ago, I could pull it over to the bench and borrow its PSU's... about as close as I can get to buying the 216 I'd want.

Are they 740s in that one?

 

[jgreco]

No, should be the 920SQ's because it's a 24 drive unit. And it's kind of a perfect opportunity to go head to head with a substantially smaller platinum power supply that I've already established numbers with.

 

[ag24]

I just finished a build with this board in an SC846 (4u, 24 bay). The airflow in this case isn't ideal for this board, I need to find a way to get more air to the CPU and LSI chip, since they're running a bit warm. Im testing disk configurations with the built in 16 port LSI.

FreeNAS is complaining about the LSI firmware (currently 19), but SM hasn't posted the latest (P20). Are there any known issues with the current firmware? At first glance everything appears to be working well...

 

[Ericloewe]

FreeNAS is complaining about the LSI firmware (currently 19), but SM hasn't posted the latest (P20). Are there any known issues with the current firmware? At first glance everything appears to be working well...

Bug them for P20. If they don't play along, you can always try the generic LSI firmware.

 

[jgreco]

I just finished a build with this board in an SC846 (4u, 24 bay). The airflow in this case isn't ideal for this board, I need to find a way to get more air to the CPU and LSI chip, since they're running a bit warm. Im testing disk configurations with the built in 16 port LSI.

I'll be working through that too, the 2012-era E5-2697v2 hypervisor is one of my candidates for upgrading, which happens to be in an 846. Damn thing sucks watts like energy's free. The Supermicro air shroud included with the 846 probably isn't well-suited to the task, but usually these can be modified with some extra sheet poly. Half the time we're doing minor tweaks to the shrouds even on "supported" configs.

FreeNAS is complaining about the LSI firmware (currently 19), but SM hasn't posted the latest (P20). Are there any known issues with the current firmware? At first glance everything appears to be working well...

Haven't gotten that far, but me, being me, I'd probably just see if I can blast the LSI firmware on there and then not worry about it.

 

[Ericloewe]

Haven't gotten that far, but me, being me, I'd probably just see if I can blast the LSI firmware on there and then not worry about it

I mean, we've seen hundreds (thousands?) of crossflashes of the SAS2008 - and that is significantly more hacky than using a different vendor's firmware for an equivalent product.
Since Supermicro seems to just be slapping their name on the files (and adding a neat UEFI shell script), I have a hard time telling people to wait it out with older/incompatible firmware.

 

[jgreco]

I mean, we've seen hundreds (thousands?) of crossflashes of the SAS2008 - and that is significantly more hacky than using a different vendor's firmware for an equivalent product.
Since Supermicro seems to just be slapping their name on the files (and adding a neat UEFI shell script), I have a hard time telling people to wait it out with older/incompatible firmware.

That's my interpretation as well...

 

[jgreco]

Managed to get one of these a few weeks ago, but never found time to play with it until just recently.

The X10SDV-7TP4F is a Xeon D-1537 storage optimized platform, sporting an LSI 2116 controller with 16 IT ports presented as SFF-8643 (high density 4 lane) , two Intel 1Gbps, and two SFP+ 10Gbps ports on a tiny little board that can take up to 128GB of RAM.


Geekbench around 15000.

With two 32GB RDIMM's and no other accessories, it is idling around 37 watts when powered by a 480 watt platinum PSU (PWS-441P-1H).

Retail cost is probably around $900, which isn't totally unreasonable if you sum up the cost of an equivalent Skylake E3 system decked out with a 16 port HBA and dual 10GbE.

It's pretty intriguing but it isn't quite blowing me away. More details as I play with it.

As a follow-up I was very curious what this might run like when integrated into a 2U chassis, and I can report that in an SC216, with an LSI RAID controller but without the second set of 10G ports, the same thing I measured above at 62 watts, which would be around 54 watts on the external PSU listed above.

Originally this was booting into ESXi and idling at around 108 watts with the SC216BE26 chassis (SAS expander backplane). I'm now showing this at ~88 watts idle after ditching the expander backplane, which probably isn't totally fair because there's electronics on the backplane, not just expanders.

So when powered off, system's around 19 watts (ecch). If I remove a PSU, that drops to around 14. It's more or less what I expected, the Supermicro supplies (920 watt, redundant) and chassis just aren't going to be super-efficient at the low end of the scale.

There's about a 40 watt penalty for the nice chassis.

 

[Mlovelace]

As a follow-up I was very curious what this might run like when integrated into a 2U chassis, and I can report that in an SC216, with an LSI RAID controller but without the second set of 10G ports, the same thing I measured above at 62 watts, which would be around 54 watts on the external PSU listed above.

Originally this was booting into ESXi and idling at around 108 watts with the SC216BE26 chassis (SAS expander backplane). I'm now showing this at ~88 watts idle after ditching the expander backplane, which probably isn't totally fair because there's electronics on the backplane, not just expanders.

So when powered off, system's around 19 watts (ecch). If I remove a PSU, that drops to around 14. It's more or less what I expected, the Supermicro supplies (920 watt, redundant) and chassis just aren't going to be super-efficient at the low end of the scale.

There's about a 40 watt penalty for the nice chassis.

So, are you going to swap out the 920's for something closer to the watts you're pulling to improve efficiency, or is this just to see what is possible?

 

[Black Ninja]

Like a 500W platinum's, if power distributor is the same is easy swap.