Released in January of this year, the TYAN GT62B-B5539 is the company’s latest addition to their 1-U server system portfolio. TYAN’s new storage solution supports a generous 4x NVMe devices and is touted by the company to deliver the best performance per watt on today’s storage market. The server system also features 4 x DDR4 DIMM slots, up to 2x 10GbE (Intel X557) and 2x GbE LOM, 1x FH/HL PCI-E x 8 slot, 2x mezzanine slots for various networking and 10 x 2.5” HDD.
Released in January of this year, the TYAN GT62B-B5539 is the company’s latest addition to their 1-U server system portfolio. TYAN’s new storage solution supports a generous 4x NVMe devices and is touted by the company to deliver the best performance per watt on today’s storage market. The server system also features 4 x DDR4 DIMM slots, up to 2x 10GbE (Intel X557) and 2x GbE LOM, 1x FH/HL PCI-E x 8 slot, 2x mezzanine slots for various networking and 10 x 2.5” HDD.
One of the more unique features of the GT62B-B5539 is its use of the all-new Intel Xeon Processor D-1500 family, which is Intel’s 3rd generation 64-bit System-on-a-Chip (SoC) but also Intel’s first ever Xeon branded SoC. The D-1500 family is built to offer superior performance and diverse software compatibility with Intel Xeon-class performance in an SoC package.This is an extremely powerful and versatile chip that can be used for a wide range of different workloads including network routing, wireless base stations, warm storage, industrial Internet of Thing (IoT), and dynamic web serving. The new product family is also billed as a noticeable improvement over the company’s previous Intel Atom Processor C2750 with speeds upwards of 3.4 times the performance per node and up to 1.7x improved performance per watt. Leveraging 14nm silicon technology, the product family is the company’s first line of processors designed to address a variety of low-power, high-density infrastructure needs.
Intel adds that their new processor will allow microservers–like the GT62B-B5539–to effectively process lightweight, hyperscale workloads in cloud service provider data centers in addition to dedicated hosting company data centers. The product family also features significant integration capabilities, such as two integrated 10 GbE Ethernet ports and support for hardware-assisted virtualization. This certainly makes it a viable option for wireless base stations, routers and switches, security and network appliances, and the build-out of Software Defined Networking and Network Functions Virtualization.
The Intel Xeon Processor D-1500 product family now available in 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, and 16 core SKUs. In addition, it comes equipped with 128GB of DDR4 addressable memory, integrated platform controller hub, integrated I/O, two integrated 10 Gigabit Intel Ethernet ports, and a thermal design point of 20 watts to 65 watts.
TYAN GT62B-B5539 Specifications
- Form Factor: 1U Rackmount
- Chassis Model: GT62B
- Dimension (D x W x H): 24.6″ x 17.2″ x 1.72″ (625.4 x 436 x 43.6mm)
- Motherboard: S5539GM4NR-D41-2T
- Gross Weight: 16 kg
- Board Dimension: Micro ATX, 9.6″x9.6″ (243.8×243.8mm)
- Front Panel
- Buttons: (1) PWR / (1) RST / (1) ID
- LEDs: (1) PWR / (1) HDD / (2) LAN / (1) ID / (1) Warning
- I/O Ports: (2) USB ports
- External Drive Bay:
- HDD backplane support: (6) SATA 6Gb/s + (4) mini-SAS HD for NVMe devices/ SAS 12Gb/s
- Supported HDD Interface: (6) SATA 6Gb/s + (4) NVMe
- FAN: (6) 4cm fans
- Power Supply
- Type: PSU
- Input Range: AC 100-127V/8A / AC 200-240V/4A
- Frequency: 50-60 Hertz
- Output Watts: 500 Watts
- Efficiency: 80 plus gold
- Processor:
- Supported CPU Series: Intel Xeon processor D-1541 SoC, 8 cores
- Thermal Design Power (TDP) wattage: 45W
- Memory
- Supported DIMM Qty: (4) DIMM slots
- DIMM Type / Speed: UDIMM/RDIMM DDR4 2133
- Capacity: Up to 64GB/128GB UDIMM/RDIMM
- Memory channel: 2 Channels
- Memory voltage: 1.2V
- Expansion Slots:
- Pre-install TYAN Riser Card: M2091, PCI-E x16 1U riser card (left) / M2092, 2U Riser Card, (2) mini-SAS HD connectors, PCI-E Gen3 x4 link
- Note: (1) OCP slot for OCP LAN card
- Pre-install TYAN OCP Riser Card: M5539-2E, (2) mini-SAS HD connectors, PCI-E Gen3 x4 link
- PCI-E: (1) PCI-E Gen2 x4 slot
- LAN
- Port Q’ty: (2) 10GbE ports, (2) GbE ports, (1) PHY dedicated for IPMI
- PHY: Realtek RTL8211E
- Controller: Intel I210 / Intel X557-AT2
- Storage:
- NVMe: (4) Internal mini-SAS HD connectors (SFF-8643) from M2092 & M5539-2E
- SATA:
- Connector: (6) SATA
- Controller: Intel Xeon processor D-1541 SoC CPU
- Speed: 6.0 Gb/s
- RAID: RAID 0/1/10/5 (Intel RST)
- Graphic:
- Connector type: D-Sub 15-pin
- Resolution: Up to 1920×1200
- Chipset: Aspeed AST2400
- I/O Ports:
- USB: (2) USB3.0 ports (2 at rear)/ (2) USB2.0 ports (2 at front)
- COM: (1) DB-9 COM port
- VGA: (1) D-Sub 15-pin port
- RJ-45: (2) 10GbE ports, (2) GbE ports, (1) PHY dedicated for IPMI
- Button: ID Button
- System Monitoring
- Chipset: Aspeed AST2400
- Temperature: Monitors temperature for CPU & memory & system environment
- Voltage: Monitors voltage for CPU, memory, chipset & power supply
- LED: Over temperature warning indicator / Fan & PSU fail LED indicator
- Others: Watchdog timer support
- Server Management
- Onboard Chipset:Onboard Aspeed: AST2400
- AST2400 IPMI Feature: IPMI 2.0 compliant baseboard management controller (BMC) / Supports storage over IP and remote platform-flash / USB 2.0 virtual hub
- AST2400 iKVM Feature: 24-bit high quality video compression / 10/100 Mb/s MAC interface
- BIOS:
- Brand / ROM size: AMI / 16MB
- Feature: Hardware Monitor / SMBIOS 2.7/PnP/Wake on LAN / PXE boot support / ACPI 3.0/ACPI sleeping states S4,S5
- Operating System: OS supported list Please refer to our Intel OS supported list.
- Regulation:
- FCC (DoC): Class A
- CE (DoC): Yes
- Operating Environment:
- Operating Temp.: 10° C ~ 35° C (50° F~ 95° F)
- Non-operating Temp.: – 40° C ~ 70° C (-40° F ~ 158° F)
- In/Non-operating Humidity: 90%, non-condensing at 35° C
- RoHS RoHS 6/6 Compliant: Yes
Design and build
The TYAN GT62B-B5539 is a 1U form factor server with 10 bays running across the front of the device, 6 SAS and 4 NVMe bays. The drive bays latched solidly and were easier to slot and unslot drives compared to other servers. On the left hand side are two USB 3.0 Ports, the reset, ID, and power buttons along with LED indicator lights indicating drives, LAN, ID, power, and warning.
The rear of the device has the power supply on the left hand side, followed by the fan, a thumbscrew that holds on the top cover, two more USB 3.0 ports with a LAN port above them, a VGA and Serial port, and two more networking ports. While the specifications state that there is a 10G port we are reviewing a pre-production model and that is why the 10G port is absent.
Removing the top panel users can see the server board, RAM, and the heat sink over the CPU. The wiring isn’t as neat as some of the other servers we’ve looked at in the past.
Configuration and Use
The TYAN GT62B-B5539 supports multiple software environments from Windows to Linux to VMware. For our review we chose to use VMware. From our Summary tab we can get an overall picture of the server including storage, memory and CPU usage.
Looking into Datastores we are able to see each drive, its type, how much overall storage it has, and how much storage is still free.
Under Storage we can look further into the devices seeing the adapters and the type of storage, in this case an Intel P3700 NVMe SSD.
Application Workload Analysis
In this review we focused on our MySQL OLTP performance via SysBench. For our application workloads each drive will be running 2 identically configured VMs. The Sysbench test measures average TPS (Transactions Per Second), average latency, as well as average 99th percentile latency at a peak load of 32 threads. Each Sysbench VM is configured with three vDisks, one for boot (~92GB), one with the pre-built database (~447GB) and the third for the database under test (270GB). From a system resource perspective, we configured each VM with 16 vCPUs, 60GB of DRAM and leveraged the LSI Logic SAS SCSI controller.
Sysbench Testing Configuration (per VM)
- CentOS 6.3 64-bit
- Storage Footprint: 1TB, 800GB used
- Percona XtraDB 5.5.30-rel30.1
- Database Tables: 100
- Database Size: 10,000,000
- Database Threads: 32
- RAM Buffer: 24GB
- Test Length: 3 hours
- 2 hours preconditioning 32 threads
- 1 hour 32 threads
In the average transactions per second benchmark, the TYAN server gave us a performance of 2,349 TPS for 1VM and an aggregate score of 2,325 TPS.
Looking at scaled average latency, 1VM was able to hit a latency as low as 13.6ms with an aggregate performance of 27.6ms.
In terms of our worst-case MySQL latency scenario (99th percentile latency), the TYAN server gave us a latency of 24ms for 1VM and an aggregate of 56ms.
Conclusion
The TYAN GT62B-B5539 is a 1U server that comes with 4 NVMe bays as well as 6 additional SAS bays for more cost-effective, high-performing storage. The new TYAN server is using the Intel Xeon Processor D-1500 family, Intel’s first SoC and currently unique to this device. The primary market for the new TYAN server is SMBs that are looking to take advantage of both the new Intel CPUs as well as NVMe all in a cost-effective manner or data centers looking for a delicate balance between power efficiency and system performance.
Looking at performance, we ran the Sysbench MySQL application benchmark on the TYAN GT62B-B5539. The server gave us a throughput performance of 2,349 TPS for 1VM as well as an aggregate score of 2,325 TPS. With 1 Sysbench VM we were able to completely saturate the CPU (strong performance offered), and 2VMs was more of proving the point that we couldn’t squeeze any more out of the system. We saw average latency as low as 13.6ms. And our worst-case scenario with latency (99th percentile latency) has us scores of 24ms for 1VM and an aggregate of 56ms. In terms of expectations for a 1U server configured with an Intel SoC, we were impressed. More performance could certainly be derived from a 1U box, especially one with four NVMe bays, but then again those servers would be much more expensive and consume vastly more power. With this particular server Tyan is trying to work the middle, offering a system capable of driving significant throughput, without eating up power and budget.
Pros
- 4 2.5″ NVMe slots
- Low power usage
- Favorably priced compared to competitors
Cons
- Lacks expansion options
The Bottom Line
The TYAN GT62B-B5539 is a 1U server that is ideal for SMBs looking to get their hands on cost-effective NVMe storage that has a low power footprint.
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