new supermicro storage chassis SC847

nice, only 1 problem. Their psus are ridiculously LOUD. Also with redundant 1400W psu and 36 sas/sata bays that chassis won't be cheap.
 
Drive bays on the back seem really inconvenient to me. At least with top-mounted bays you can get at the drives without walking around the rack.
 
ya depends on what kinda rack environment you have. Drive bays in the back would be easy for me at work but pita at home cuz my rack at home is right against the wall.
 
Drive bays on the back seem really inconvenient to me. At least with top-mounted bays you can get at the drives without walking around the rack.

Hmmm, walk around the rack to get at drives..

Or walk around the rack to make sure your cable management arms and wiring extend correctly, then walk back to the front of the rack, get on a stool and get at the top mount drives...
 
The rear drive sleds will be a PITA to get to, but the 45 drive version will be my first choice to complement my SC846E1 which is nearly full. Looks like these will be around $1600 depending on which version you choose.
 
Hmmm, walk around the rack to get at drives..

Or walk around the rack to make sure your cable management arms and wiring extend correctly, then walk back to the front of the rack, get on a stool and get at the top mount drives...

I do rather hate cable management arms. Someone needs to come out with a server that has the power and network plugs on the back of the rails, and runs them inside the rail, so you don't need a CMA. Stupid pieces of crap.

But with the top-mount disks, at least half the rack's disks are accessible without a stool. And if you're tall like me, 3/4ths ;)
 
I'd rather not squeeze 36 drives in a 4U chassis - especially if there are 12 drives to heat up my mb/cpu directly from below, let alone the front drives which give a "warm welcome" to the incoming air.
 
Anyone got one of these yet?

Are we talking really noisy or insane noisy?
 
If noise is a concern ,then SM products are not for you.

All of them are loud :)
 
Supermicro actually do a special quiet version of the 1400W PSU used in the 847 (It used in their GPGPU workstation case), I've asked if they can supply the 847E16 with the quieter "PWS-1K41P-1R-SQ" PSU. Since the 7 fans are all MB connected PWM ones they should be speed controllable so I think it is the PSU that will be the noisiest part.
 
SM has finally updated their website with links to the JBOD versions (e.g 45 drives) of this case:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/847/SC847E16-RJBOD1.cfm

Note the photos show how cascade ports are exposed just to the right on the power supply (2 in and 2 out). This looks like a great case to build a single storage system that will easily scale to 100s of TBs in an manner this is much more powerful than eSata and I believe will actually be LESS cost. For example with a single LSI 8-port SAS HBA you could attach up to 244 2TB drives or almost 500TB.

I pulled the trigger on this today...SM is NOT ramped up for high volume distribution on this...there are only a handful of samples available...sample pricing is $1600 for the model above. They are waiting for more backplanes to come in to build more so I'm told it may be 2-3 weeks before my order if filled. The dual-port version (E26) is not even available yet.

Will followup with photos when I get my hands on it.
 
Supermicro actually do a special quiet version of the 1400W PSU used in the 847 (It used in their GPGPU workstation case), I've asked if they can supply the 847E16 with the quieter "PWS-1K41P-1R-SQ" PSU. Since the 7 fans are all MB connected PWM ones they should be speed controllable so I think it is the PSU that will be the noisiest part.
Just wondering, if you got the answer from SM for that silent version. Im planning to buy 846e1 and if its possible to get that quiet PSU instead, that would be great and i dont mind paying more.
 
He says he is concerned about the bandwidth of the expander version. There would be 24 drives transferring over a single SFF-8087 cable, which has four 3 Gbps channels, so that is 6 drives per 3 Gbps channel. Could be a bottleneck.
 
Hey, this is Nate, the guy who did that blog post.. noticed the traffic form here and figured I'd come chime in. ;)

Yeah, the reason I avoided the port multipliers was because we want to be able to pull full bandwidth from all drives.. since the majority are SATA, that bandwidth would probably be OK.. but for the ZIL we're using Crucial RealSSD's, which can actually push more than 3gbit reads on their own.. so if we used the currently-available port-expander versions (can't find the SAS2 versions on the market yet), we'd actually have to dedicate an entire lane to that (and lose either 2 or 5 drive bays, depending if it is in the front or the back), and wouldn't get full bandwidth to the drive even so.

I'd love to see a compromise for SAS2, with 2 or 4 port multipliers (with multipath) on the front and 2 on the back.. that would be a very nice compromise between bandwidth and number of cables required.

As far as noise goes, not a concern at all for us, as we have real data centers that these are going in.. I can confirm it is quite noisy however. ;) I connected 5 of the 7 front fans to the motherboard, and 2 to the front backplane (as the cables weren't log enough to reach the motherboard, and I didn't feel like getting extensions since we want them running full speed anyways..).. but with cable extenders hooking those up to the motherboard would certainly get you speed control there. I would imagine that the low-noise versions of the power supplies would power the machine, but I do not know how they make them quiet - if they do it by relying on cooling within the chassis to cool the power supplies, I'm fairly confident that would not work for this guy. ;(

Be happy to answer any additional questions about the chassis, as long as it doesn't require me to rip it apart and look -- it's in beta testing at our data center now!
 
Hi, I have one of these hooked up to an Areca 1880x card, but because of the loud noise, I'd like to only turn it on when I need to. The problem is that it's used by a VM on an ESXi box that I cannot reboot at will. The 1880x is setup as hardware pass through to the Server 2008R2 guest OS. I noticed that with 1.50 firmware on the 1880x card, the drives is the SC847-JBOD will be recognized about half the time if I turn the SC847 on after the 1880x card has booted. However, with 1.51 firmware, the drives never show up. On the other hand, if I turn the SC847 on first, and then turn on the ESXi box, and the 1880x "sees" the chassis/expander/drives when it boots on power up, it always works.

Does anyone know of a way to get the 1880x card to "rescan" for new attached drives? I've posted this question on the Areca user thread, but not responses thus far and so I figure I'd try here...

Thanks in advance!
 
I've created my own thread but figured I'd post here in case anyone's subscribed and can easily answer it.

Does anyone know where I can get a hold of a SC847E16-RJBOD1 from a UK or Euro supplier as per the link below?

http://www.supermicro.co.uk/products/chassis/4U/?chs=847

I was going to say the cheapest supplier but as I'm struggling to find almost any even a few names would do right now.

I've checked all the ones recommended from SuperMicro's "where to buy" section.

I think I've found one UK supplier.

The chassis was brought to market in late 2010 and seems fairly rare in that it's from a reputable company with decent build quality and a HUGE amount of storage in a small-ish form factor.

There are a few US companies but delivery to the UK is understandably (given the weight) astronomical.

Thanks!!!
 
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