Quite a few changes have happened in the lab recently. so I decided to do a multipart blog on the changes.
The refresh was triggered by the purchase of a SuperMicro Server (2027TR-H71FRF) chassis with 4x X9DRT Nodes / Blades. This is known as a BigTwin configuration in SuperMicro parlance. This is something I was very familiar with as most of the Nutanix nodes that we deployed at Zen were of this design.
Each node has 2x Intel Xeon CPU E5-2670 @ 2.60GHz 3 Nodes have 192GB of RAM and 1 has 128GB giving a combined 64c/128t and 704GB of RAM. Quite an amount to be squeezed into 2U.
This is a huge uplift in compute resources so is more than welcome. I also decided to put what I could in a proper rack and purchased a Startech 25U rack to mount it.
The plan is also to make a serious network investment (to move me away from 1Gb) but I haven’t completely decided what that will look like. This will likely be the final investment for a while.
With the additional Supermicro compute available I have made the Z840 a sort of standalone node. I will keep it around as it’s the only thing capable of running my Nvidia K2.
