On June 20th, Lenovo released information about their upcoming blade servers built on the upcoming Intel Xeon processor: the two processor ThinkSystem SN550 and the four processor ThinkSystem SN850. Although there doesn’t appear to be any spec sheets yet on the products, there are a few things that can be extracted from the published 3D tour.
According to the ThinkSystem SN550 3D tour, the server “features two Next Generation Intel Xeon Bronze, Silver, Gold or Platinum processors with up to 28 cores each.” In addition, it lists “24 DIMM slots supporting TruDDR4 Memory, up to 1.5TB using 64GB LRDIMMs up to 2666 MHz.” As for expansion, it appears they will have 2 x I/O expansion cards supporting 10GbE, 40GbE, 16Gb Fibre Channel and FDR Infiniband. Lastly, there will be 2 x hot-plug drive bays supporting SAS, SATA HDD / SSD as well as PCIe NVMe SSDs.
The 3D tour for the ThinkSystem SN850 mentions the server “features four Next Generation Intel Xeon Gold and Platinum Processors with up to 28 cores each.” As for the memory, the server supports “48 R/LR DIMM slots 1.2V with up to 3TB using 64GB LRDIMMs.” It also mentions “Operates at speeds up to 2666 MHz.” As would be expected, since the the SN850 is double-wide, it supports 4 x I/O expansion cards and 4 x hot-plug drive bays.
While I don’t see any competitive advantages from the 3D tour, I think Lenovo has given us some insights on what we can expect with the upcoming “Next Generation Intel Xeon” CPU. If you’d like to see the details I removed, I encourage you to go to the sites mentioned above.
Kevin Houston is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of BladesMadeSimple.com. He has 20 years of experience in the x86 server marketplace. Since 1997 Kevin has worked at several resellers in the Atlanta area, and has a vast array of competitive x86 server knowledge and certifications as well as an in-depth understanding of VMware and Citrix virtualization. Kevin has worked at Dell EMC as a Server Sales Engineer covering the Global Enterprise market since August 2011 and currently works as a Chief Technical Architect supporting the Central Region.
Disclaimer: The views presented in this blog are personal views and may or may not reflect any of the contributors’ employer’s positions. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any employer. No compensation has been provided for any part of this blog.
Pingback: Lenovo First to Announce Blades with New Intel CPUs – Real World UCS