Today only: ASUS Z10PC-D8 dual Xeon E5 MB w/dual SFP+ for $199

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big dog

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Feb 12, 2018
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Edit 3: Out of stock.
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Edit 2: These are now $185.40 each plus $8.21 shipping, and no purchase limit.
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Sorry for the late post. This one is good for about six more hours: ASUS Z10PC-D8/10G-2S(ASMB8-IKVM) Optimize for Big Data - Newegg.com

It's $299 with a $100 instant rebate promo code, limit 3. I went ahead and bought three of them for $600 shipped.

For CPUs, I bought two Xeon E5-2630L-V3 from Aliexpress for $118 each: Original Intel Xeon ES QEYX E5 2630LV3 CPU 8 core 1.8GHZ 20M LGA2011 3 E5 2630L V3 processor E5 V3 Engineering sample E5 2630LV3-in Processors from Computer & Office on Aliexpress.com | Alibaba Group

They have a photo of them working with the same Asus motherboard without the two 10Gbe ports.

Edit: Anyway, they looked pretty nice. Quad-channel DDR4, 10xSATA3, dedicated ipmi, dual 1Gbe and, of course, the two 10Gbe ports. This is the kind of deal where I want either three or none, but I convinced myself to buy three, even though I can't afford 6 Xeons now, let alone all 24 DIMMs.

The one thing that made me hesitate was this forum post I found on the onboard Qlogic BCM57840: Gigabit and 10-gig Ethernet fiber SFP slots and lock-in: Don't buy Cisco, Extreme, 3Com, HP, or Intel gear

"The broadcom/qlogic BCM57840 DEFINITELY has vendor-locks on it; it would not bring up the link with either mikrotik compatible 10gtek sfp+ modules, or mellanox compatible modules from another vendor. (reported 20 July 2017 by Bryan Levin)"
I have a Mikrotik CSS326-24G-2S+RM, and I'm planning on getting either a CRS317-1G-16S+RM, or else a Quanta LB6M. The Asus on-board chip is the BCM57840S, so I would imagine that it not be too locked down to just a few switch vendors. But if I can't connect it to a switch I can afford, then I thought I could at least direct connect them to each other for a private 10Gbe network.
 
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wildpig1234

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Aug 22, 2016
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probably the cheapest dual 2011 v3/v4 MB. But it's so limited in memory slots and pci-e, would hamper any upgrades later.. If you got a little more to swing, I would recommend getting the z10ped16-ws, which has a lot more features.
 

big dog

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Feb 12, 2018
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probably the cheapest dual 2011 v3/v4 MB. But it's so limited in memory slots and pci-e, would hamper any upgrades later.. If you got a little more to swing, I would recommend getting the z10ped16-ws, which has a lot more features.
My use case is for a Ceph cold-storage pool, with maybe an SSD read cache layer of some sort. RAM is so expensive now, that 8 DIMMSs per MB seems like plenty. My next dream would be to put an Intel 900P in each one for a write cache, but that will definitely have to wait.
 

anoother

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Dec 2, 2016
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Wow, super deal, and one that actually ships to the UK, too.

Nabbed one, though probably won't be able to use it for a while.

EDIT: With import duty, I'm not sure whether this makes sense against TR. But trigger-happiness prevails once again ;)
 
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BobbyB

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Dec 26, 2016
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EDIT: With import duty, I'm not sure whether this makes sense against TR. But trigger-happiness prevails once again ;)
Don't forget that TR is unbuffered ECC only and lacks IPMI (typically, not sure if a needed feature for you, would be for me). Now you can feel better about buying the ASUS board :)
 

pgh5278

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Oct 25, 2012
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Don't forget that TR is unbuffered ECC only and lacks IPMI (typically, not sure if a needed feature for you, would be for me). Now you can feel better about buying the ASUS board :)
The images of this board on newegg, have the ASUS IMPI board installed, and is included in the board name, good chance it will have it..?
 

anoother

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Dec 2, 2016
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The images of this board on newegg, have the ASUS IMPI board installed, and is included in the board name, good chance it will have it..?
I'd be quite annoyed if it wasn't there.

I think ASUS has included the iKVM module by default for a few years now.
 

TLN

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Feb 26, 2016
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I've snapped one yesterday at 3AM when I saw this topic. Got mATX ASrock with 10G and SAS3008 recently, will decide which one to keep. Not too mention I have several Z10PED16-WS, but I want to downsize a little.
 

big dog

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Feb 12, 2018
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Where did you find the photo?
Here it is, the last photo on the left. Look at the top line. They were using an Asus Z10PA-D8.

32 Haswell-EP threads for $200 plus 2x$116 plus RAM. I hope my karma is good enough for this to work.
 

Churchill

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Jan 6, 2016
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it'd be a great firewall board, not enough bandwidth and PCI-Express slots to use it as storage.
 

big dog

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it'd be a great firewall board, not enough bandwidth and PCI-Express slots to use it as storage.
I'll be using Ceph, and these Asus MBs are pretty close to their ideal OSD node configuration: Hardware Recommendations — Ceph Documentation

It really depends on what you are doing. For throughput-optimized storage, the network will usually be the bottleneck. For raw IOPs, the CPUs can saturate before the network.(See here and here.) For capacity-optimized storage with Ceph, it's often just how many interfaces you have to hang devices on as inexpensively as possible.

In fact, me getting these three LGA 2011-3 systems represents a slight change of plans, since originally I was going to go with 4x3GB $60 SATA drives using erasure coding on 12 (k+m, where k=8 and m=4) OSD hosts (using 15 BIOSTAR A68N-5545 AMD A8-5545 (Quad core 1.7G, turbo 2.7G) Processor AMD A70M Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo - Newegg.com I bought for $45 each on Black Friday), each with 2 1Gbe connections to the 24 Gbe ports on a Mikrotik 326-24G-2S+RM, with one of the 10 Gbe connections going to the RGW and monitor node, and the other 10GBe port to my workstation. Now I have the option of building my storage pool the way everyone else does - get a real 10Gbe switch and put as many OSDs as possible on three or more 10Gbe-connected OSD hosts. Maximizing storage capacity vs. cost, the trade-off is the ratio of the cost of the systems (MB/CPUs/RAM/NICs) to the cost of the raw TBs of storage. If you are looking at a base cost of $20/raw TB and you want to scale-out, then it can't be emphasized enough that all other components need to be CHEAP! For example, do you want to boot from a dedicated SSD? This may be ok for a few large OSD hosts, but it burns a SATA3 port per node and the ~$60 x 12 OSD nodes to support full EC host failure domains is $60x12=$720/$20=36 fewer TBs for a given budget. Better to boot from a $12 USB 3.0 32GB thumb drive, PXE boot or just boot from one of the OSD drives themselves. Anyway, I'm sure this is off-topic for the deals forum, but I'll try to give updates in the appropriate places as this project progresses.
 
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webjunkie

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Mar 17, 2016
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Anyone have another reasonable source for v3 or v4 CPUs for these boards that aren't engineering samples?
 

big dog

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Feb 12, 2018
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Anyone have another reasonable source for v3 or v4 CPUs for these boards that aren't engineering samples?
It's funny that Newegg had their "special deal", including the purchase limit of three, but then dropped the price even more and removed the purchase limit. It stands to reason that the boards weren't moving fast enough for them. But then, within hours, they are completely sold out. I can't help but think it was my post in this "great deals" forum that made the difference. If STH forums have that kind of impact, that's impressive!

Anyway webjunkie, I'm in the same boat. It's Spring Festival (aka "Chinese New Year") now and all of China is shut down. My Aliexpress order is still in state "Awaiting Shipment". There is no chance now that I'll receive the CPUs before the MB return period. Oh well.
 
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