Gigabyte puts 10GbE on their GA-6PXSVT S2011 board

Storage servers without the piecemeal approach

Mar 10, 2014 by

Gigabyte LogoGigabyte is putting out an interesting server board, the 10GbE wielding GA-6PXSVT. If you are looking for a single S2011 board for your storage servers, this may be the device for you.

In terms of CPU and memory, the GA-6PXSVT is nothing special, it will take a single Ivy Bridge aka Xeon E5-1600 or 2600 V2 CPU and 8 ECC DIMMs. To this Gigabyte adds an Intel 82574L 10GbE controller with an SPF+ port for your choice of cables. Graphics and KVM duties are from the workhorse Aspeed AST2400 chip, pretty standard in modern Xeon boxes.

Gigabyte GA-6PXSVT storage server board

Note the extra plug in front and lots in back

You may have noticed we called this a storage server, and if you look at the right side of the picture you can see why. There are eight additional SATA6 ports on the back courtesy of a Marvell 88SE9230 SATA controller. This allows the standard Intel RAID 0/1/5 plus RAID 0/1/10 from the Marvell ports. While it isn’t RAID 5/6/50/60 across all 14 ports, it should be more than good enough for most SMBs.

If you are looking for a high throughput box with lots of storage, the GA-6PXSVT is an interesting choice. The platform is solid, the 10GbE chip is proven, and the Marvell controller is a known quantity too. You can easily bottleneck on the network with a full complement of SSDs but this board should be just about right for a large load of HDDs without hitting bandwidth limits like 1GbE devices did. Having all this in one package is quite useful.S|A

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Charlie Demerjian

Roving engine of chaos and snide remarks at SemiAccurate
Charlie Demerjian is the founder of Stone Arch Networking Services and SemiAccurate.com. SemiAccurate.com is a technology news site; addressing hardware design, software selection, customization, securing and maintenance, with over one million views per month. He is a technologist and analyst specializing in semiconductors, system and network architecture. As head writer of SemiAccurate.com, he regularly advises writers, analysts, and industry executives on technical matters and long lead industry trends. Charlie is also available through Guidepoint and Mosaic. FullyAccurate