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If one has any doubt on the increasing popularity of server builds these days, a quick look at the response to our sister site article, ‘ Building a Home Server – The Complete Guide‘ should ease your mind.
Our prediction is that servers will soon be to desktops, what ultrabooks are becoming to laptop systems, a mainstream alternative. Our meeting with ASRock seemed to show that they had much the same opinion as well.
This week at ceBIT 2013 in Hanover, Germany, we met with Liang Lee, AVP ASRock Sales (and former member of the LSI family) who introduced us to the new world of ASRock server coverage. Front and center was their new Dual Xeon 2600 Series server which allowed for dual sided hybrid storage.
This ASRock ‘barebones server’ is built on their own EP2C602-2T2OS6/D16 server board and allows for 12 x 3.5″ SAS 6G/SATA 6G drives on the front, along with 6 more slots on the back for 2.5″ HDD or SSD installation. This setup could provide for some amazing ideas with respect to performance acceleration of the overall system.
The motherboard itself allows for 2 x Xeon processors and 16 DIMMS in a layout that provides for amazing heat dissipation. We happened to mention Liang’s previous employ as that expertise no doubt played a part of the LSI SAS 2308 IO controller on the server motherboard and LSI SAS 2×20 expander IC on the HDD’s backplane, providing for amazing performance and bandwidth.
Add to this setup the ability to install two PCIe 3.0 express cards and we think this server just may have the making of an ideal test bench. We’re just sayin!
In addition to this server, ASRock also had their new server motherboard family on display including a surprise or two within the pack. Let’s take a look at a few of these boards.
