Aiming High: Check Out These Upcoming Servers Based On Intel's New Xeon E7 Family

Bring On The New Servers

Intel last week officially unveiled its Xeon processor E7 v2 family of high-end processors with 15 cores and the ability to address 1.5 TB of memory per socket, or triple the memory capability of the previous generation of processors. That, the company said, makes the new Xeon E7 v2 processors ideal for applications running complex analytics, including such mission-critical applications as business support systems, CRM and ERP.

Intel also introduced 21 server and storage vendors developing systems using the Xeon processor E7 v2 processors, as well as 16 analytics application developers who have committed to the technology. Here's what Intel's new processors are capable of and nine companies that are now upping their server game because of it.

The Intel Xeon Processor E7 v2 Family

Intel's new Xeon processor E7 v2 processors can be used in industry-standard servers with up to 32 sockets, with each socket supporting up to 15 processing cores and 1.5 TB of memory. The result, according to Intel, is double the performance of the company's previous generation of processors. The processors also feature Intel Integrated I/O, Intel Data Direct I/O and support for PCIe 3.0, which together result in up to four times the I/O bandwidth over the previous models.

Intel is targeting that performance primarily at big data and in-memory analytics, which places an entire data set in system memory rather than on disk storage.

Cisco UCS

Cisco updated three UCS servers to support the Intel Xeon E7 v2 processors, including:

Cisco UCS B460 M4 blade server, with up to four processors, 6 TB of memory and 320-Gbps Ethernet throughput, giving it double the performance of its predecessor.

4U Cisco UCS C460 M4 rack server with up to 6 TB of DDR3 memory in 96 DIMM slots, up to 12 small-form-factor drive bays, up to 10 PCIe Gen 3 slots, and an internal slot for a hard-disk drive array controller card.

Cisco UCS B260 M4 blade server, with up to two processors, 160-Gbps bandwidth and 3 TB of memory. Connect two blades via the UCS M4 Scalable Connector to upgrade it to a four-socket UCS B460 M4 server.

The three new servers are expected to ship in the second quarter of 2014.

Dell PowerEdge

The new Dell PowerEdge R920, targeting mission-critical applications for midsize and large enterprises, is a new compute-intensive rack server with highly scalable memory and I/O capabilities.

The Dell PowerEdge R920 supports up to four Intel Xeon E7 v2 processors, dual RAID controllers and up to 6 TB of memory for use in mission-critical workloads such as ERP, CRM, e-commerce and in-memory databases.

The PowerEdge R920 is scheduled to ship worldwide later this quarter.

Fujitsu Primequest 2000 Series

Fujitsu said its new Primequest 2000 server family targets the mission-critical functionality and availability of Unix systems for applications like those that use in-memory technology, such as SAP HANA.

The Fujitsu Primequest 2000 lineup can be configured with up to eight Xeon E7 v2 processors and up to 12 TB of memory, and includes such features as self-healing reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) components.

The top-of-the-line Fujitsu Primequest 2400E and 2800E models also include a new Dynamic Reconfiguration feature that allows online replacement of system boards with on-the-fly repartitioning while the system is still up and running.

The servers are slated to ship later this month.

HP ProLiant DL580 Generation 8 Server

The new HP ProLiant DL580 Gen8 server, based on the Intel Xeon E7-8800/4800 v2 processor, can fit up to 12 TB of flash or hard drive storage, and comes with nine PCI slots.

The HP ProLiant DL580 Gen 8 is currently available for ordering worldwide, with pricing starting at $13,079.

Hitachi Data Systems Says To Watch This Space

HDS said it is preparing to unveil new servers in its Compute Blade product line based on the new Intel Xeon E7 v2 processors.

The upcoming models will be a part of Hitachi Data Systems’ Unified Compute Platform (UCP) converged infrastructure solutions for mission-critical business applications, big data analytics and private clouds, and will feature the company's server technologies including native logical partitioning and cold standby failover.

IBM X6 Family

IBM introduced its new System x3850 X6 and System x3950 X6 servers, which offer self-healing processor, I/O and memory features the company said improves availability by proactively identifying potential failures and taking action to correct them. New IBM Upward Integration Modules also provide hardware visibility to the hypervisor to improve system and virtual machine management.

IBM X6 servers include the four-socket System x3850 X6, scheduled to ship March 5; the eight-socket System x3950 X6, scheduled to ship June 10; and the IBM Flex System x880 scalable compute nodes, scheduled to ship later this year.

The x3950 X6 fits up to eight sockets in a 8U chassis with up to 12 TB of memory and up to 12.8 TB of memory-channel storage using 400-GB eXFlash DIMMs. Expandability comes via up to 18 Gen 3 PCIe slots in the rear and four Gen 2 slots in the front.

NEC Express5800/A2000 Series

NEC Corporation of America unveiled the Express5800/A2000 series enterprise server using the Intel Xeon E7 v2 product family. The A2000 series is the sixth generation of NEC’s Enterprise Intel Server Architecture, and can be configured with up to 4 TB of memory, 60 cores and 16 PCIe 3.0 slots in a 4U chassis.

The new servers include NEC's dynamic partitioning technology and on-demand functionality to allow scaling of performance by adding CPU cores as needed, as well as the ability to replace components or add memory without doing a server reboot.

The new NEC Express5800/A2000 servers can be ordered beginning Feb. 28, with a list price starting at $30,000. Shipment is scheduled to start in March.

Supermicro X10 SuperServers

Supermicro is shipping a new family of X10 SuperServer servers based on the Intel Xeon processor E7-8800/4800 v2 family.

The new X10 SuperServer features four processor sockets, with 96 DIMM slots supporting up to 6 TB of DDR3 1,600MHz memory, up to 48 2.5-inch hot-swap SSDs or hard drives, a 12-Gbps SAS backplane, and 11 PCI-E 3.0 slots.

Supermicro also plans to release a new high-memory-capacity dual-socket, two-node platform supporting dual Intel Xeon E7-8800/4800/2800 v2 family processors per node. Each of these 2U servers will offer 32 DIMM sockets per node supporting up to 4 TB of memory.

Unisys Forward Enterprise Computing Platform

Unisys, which has offered its Forward line of enterprise servers based on Intel's E5 processor family since October, plans to release a new line based on the new Intel Xeon processor E7 v2 family.

The E7-based model of Forward by Unisys will be targeted at SAP HANA and big data applications. Forward by Unisys combines Unisys’ secure partitioning (s-Par) software technology with Intel Xeon family processors into a powerful, secure, and flexible fabric architecture to handle mission-critical applications on an industry-standard platform.

The E7-based Forward servers are scheduled to ship in June with prices starting at $89,000.