mainframe.dev

Introduction The Leopard is an OpenRack v1 compliant 12V server commissioned by Facebook to offer compute power. It consists of 2x Intel Xeon E5-2678 v3 and is available with either DDR3 or DDR4 memory. The model is manufactured by two vendors primarily: Quanta and Wiwynn. Leopard features a 24x PCIe slot which can fit either a PCIe card with low profile, or a riser card with 1x 16x and 1x 8x slots. The server also supports a 3.5" SATA drive as well as either an mSATA or an M.2 drive mounted on the motherboard. Connectivity wise Leopard has a mezzanine card slot allowing for example 10Gb/s or 25Gb/s Ethernet. Figure 1: Wiwynn Leopard DDR4 from the front Source: Wiwynn OCP design package Figure 2: Wiwynn Leopard DDR4 from above Source: Wiwynn OCP design package Figure 1 and figure 2 shows the server layout. The server is made to fit inside an OpenRack v1 enclosure, at which point it looks something like figure 3. Due to power constraints an OpenRack v1 can fit ...

Let's say that you are a system administrator in a decently sized company. You're responsible for selecting new servers for a pretty decently sized upgrade round in your data centers, or maybe you're building a new datacenter. It's not that long ago this happened last time for your company, but since we're living in an ever-changing world things of course are complicated. What do you do? Let's look at your options. Go with the same vendor and same models as you did previously. Safe bet, will not get you fired even if it's the least cost effective solution. Probably will not get you promoted either though, and the pains of today will be the pains of tomorrow. Look around for new vendors. Maybe you're finally looking at Supermicro instead of only doing HPE, or the other way around. Risks are higher, but all those issues with iDRAC/iLO/IPMI are surely fixed on the other vendor - right? This is the world I remember living in when I worked for a small I...