Advatronix Cirrus 1200: a Storage Server Under Your Desk
by Johan De Gelas on June 6, 2014 5:00 AM ESTComparison
Below we've summarized the most prominent features of the Advatronix Cirrus 1200, the Dell T320, and Fujitsu TX150-S8 in the table below.
Cirrus 1200 vs Alternatives | |||||||||
Cirrus 1200 | Dell T320 | Fujitsu TX150-S8 | |||||||
Server format |
Non-standard cubic tower |
4U rack or tower | 4U rack or tower | ||||||
Max. processing power |
Quad-core Xeon E3 2.4 GHz |
10-core Xeon E5-2470 at 2.4 GHZ |
8-core Xeon E5-2450 at 2.1 GHz |
||||||
Max. RAM capacitiy | 32GB | 96GB | 96GB | ||||||
Max. Raw HD Storage Capacity |
10 x 4TB (+ 2 x 1TB) |
8 x 4TB | 8 x 4TB | ||||||
Max. Networking capabilities |
2 x 1GbE 2 x 10 GbE (optional) |
2 x 1 GbE quadport GbE (***) |
2 x 1 GbE quadport GbE (***) | ||||||
Expansion | 1 PCIe 8x slot(*) | 5 PCIe Slots |
5x PCIe 1x PCI |
||||||
Best PSU Redundant? |
400W (Gold) yes |
495W (Platinum) yes |
450W (Platinum) yes |
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Min. idle power consumption (**) | 89W | <70W | 65W | ||||||
Price (see below) | $5874 | $5983 | No idea |
(*) Two taken by standard Adaptec RAID card, one free
(**) According to vendor specifications
(***) You can add more ports by using optional NICs
Both Fujitsu and Dell offer more processing power, as the Xeon E5-24xx is able to offer 8 to 10 cores and much larger L3 caches (up to 20MB instead of 8MB). Combine this with the possibility of up to 96GB of RAM (6 x 16GB), and it is clear that the Dell and Fujitsu can be used as virtual host servers. The Cirrus 1200 is much less suitable for that kind of workload.
The Advatronix specs are clearly favorable when it comes to storage and file serving. It offers an optional 10 GbE NIC while the Dell is stuck at quadport 1 GbE. There are fewer limitations when it comes to using 4TB disks than is the case for Dell and Fujitsu. And you can mix the slow and large capacity 3.5" HDs with 2.5" SSDs; Dell and Fujitsu require you to chose between the two.
Price Comparison
Fujitsu goes the IBM way: it is not transparant about pricing and the focus of the company seems to be on the more expensive servers and not on "industry standard" (x86) servers. Unfortunately, were unable to get pricing details.
Dell thankfully does not let us down. For the Dell configuration we took the following options: Xeon E5-2430L (6 cores at 2 GHz, 60W TDP), the chassis with 8 3.5'' drive bays, the PERC H710p RAID controller, 4 x 8GB ECC DIMMs and 8 x 2TB SATA drivers. We used a low power Xeon E5 to be comparable with the Cirrus 1200's low power Xeon E3. The PERC RAID controller was chosen to be in the same league as the Adaptec 71605 of the Cirrus 1200.
We selected the Cirrus 1200—Windows Server 2012 Standard configuration and added 32GB of ECC RAM for Advatronix. You get slightly less processing power, but the Cirrus 1200 offers you a lot more storage instead. You get 10 standard 2TB drives (instead of 8 in Dell) and two 250GB drives for booting the OS. Considering that Dell charges you $324 per 2TB drive, the Cirrus 1200 is competitively priced.
The Cirrus 1200 has fewer expansion slots, but we doubt that will be a show stopper in most small enterprises. That's especially true when you consider that you can add an optional 10 GbE controller, an option that Dell does not offer.
The biggest advantage of the Dell configuration is the dual SD module (limited to a small 2GB) that can be used to host a VMware ESXi , (Citrix) Xen server, (Redhat) KVM, or Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor. As a result, you save a bit on power (about 12W compared to a RAID-1 SATA configuration) and you get a more robust solution than what is possible with SATA disks.
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mrshadow75 - Thursday, June 12, 2014 - link
If I had $5k to spend I would seriously have a closer look on used EMC² CX3 or CX4 storages on ebay.... you almost can´t beat the features and performance of those...AdvatronixSystems - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
Well, there are quite a few reasons why I wouldn't go with the server you suggested. (I'm looking at their redundant PSU version, which is over $6.7k starting price.)It comes with a redundant PSU, a dual-core i3 Processor, 2 500GB drives, and a pair of HBA cards. Again, over $6.8k.
Or, for $4,564, you can get a Cirrus with a redundant PSU, an actual server grade, quad-core processor (E3-1265L V2), an actual hardware RAID card with 1024mb cache. Also, it includes TWELVE drives, not two. :)
Compare yourself - http://www.45drives.com/products/order/dw-redundan... or http://www.advatronix.com/store/servers/cirrus-120...
nagi603 - Monday, June 16, 2014 - link
Damn, I wish I could just buy the chassis itself with the bays for my unRAID array...AdvatronixSystems - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
You can, actually!Please contact me at sales@advatronix.com and we'll get you set up.
snwcrash - Thursday, July 3, 2014 - link
Does Advatronix make this chassis? I would love to purchase it separately :-)AdvatronixSystems - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link
It is indeed our own proprietary chassis, and we do sell it by itself.If you're interested in acquiring the chassis separately, you can contact me at sales@advatronix.com.