Super Micro Intros High Density Storage Chassis

Super Micro on Tuesday introduced a double-sided storage chassis that features 36 hot-swappable, 3.5-inch hard drive trays in a 4U space.

The SC847 chassis includes 24 trays in the front and 12 in the rear to help customers reduce rack space. When JBOD, a non-RAID drive architecture, is used, A 4U SC847 chassis can support 21 drives in the rear for a total of 45 3.5-inch drives.

The new system is also available in 1U, 2U, and 3U configurations. Features include redundant power supplies with Power Management Bus functionality. PMBus is an open standard, power-management protocol.

The SC847 series uses Molex's iPass interconnect system for mapping four drives per cable for easier maintenance, Super Micro said. The new chassis supports both 6 Gb per second and 3 Gb/s SAS interfaces for high-bandwidth storage applications.

All of Super Micro's storage chassis support single-processor and dual-processor motherboards. The company unveiled its latest offering at the Storage Visions 2010 conference in Las Vegas, Nev.

Super Micro unveiled the SC847 series two months after introducing the SuperBlade server with double the number of dual-socket server blades than other models in the product line.

The new TwinBlade design makes it possible to fit 20 dual-processor compute nodes per 7U enclosure, instead of the usual 10. The design features a density of 0.35U per blade and 94% power supply efficiency, according to the vendor. The system also takes up 70% less space than SuperBlade systems without the double-density design.

The new server, based on the SBI-7226T-T2 blade, is available with Mellanox Technologies 40 Gb per second QDR InfiniBand.