Server hardware for professional use

[Tilo_S_]

Hi,

i´m trying to qualify a hardware platform supporting media sdk hw accelleration for setting up a transcoder farm in a computing center. To my astonishmnent this seems nearly impossible.

Ideally we would use 1 ru rack servers, or even better so called "micro-cloud" servers packing 8 or 12 computing units into 3 ru rackspace. Unfortunately all larger vendors like hp, dell, ibm or supermicro do not sell prebuild solutions with core i7 or xeon-e3 with integrated graphics core.

Moreover, when looking at so called "barebone" systems i found out that most of them have an internal matrox g200 or similar onboard graphics, that cannot be disabled to activate the intel integrated graphics hardware (supermicro says "there is simply no connection to vga output").

On the other hand i don´t want to place 3ru desktop or workstation hw into expensive rackspace.

Any thougts are welcome.

Tilo

[Nina_K_Intel]

Hi Tilo,

You are right that HW choice is not trivial.

For Ivybridge generation of Xeon E3 (E3-12x5 v2) there are no micro-cloud systems in the market where Media SDK HW acceleration can be used (AFAIK). There is an offer from Quanta but it cannot enable Intel Graphics due to the general reason you described above - no VGA connection for IG (http://www.quantaqct.com/en/01_product/02_detail.php?mid=27&sid=155&id=157&qs=95). For Ivybridge Core processors (3rd Gen Core) the situation is somewhat better in 1 ru segment. For instance, you could look at http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/1u/5017/sys-5017p-tln4f.cfm

We expect that there will be more HW offers for Haswell generation Xeons (E3-12x5 v3) as well as 4th Gen Core. If you'd like to discuss this in more detail please don't hesitate to email me at nina.kurina@intel.com.

Regards,

Nina

[Nina_K_Intel]

Hi Tilo,

There are several high-density systems that I missed to mention (IvyBridge based), please check out:

http://us.kontron.com/products/systems+and+platforms/cloud+computing+platform+solutions++app/symkloud+ms2900+web.html

http://www.quickfirenetworks.com/#!platforms/ck0e

Regards,

Nina