Reading about the server and seeing it at the bottom of the “Quad Processor Multi-core Servers” list on our dedicated servers page is pretty interesting, but the real geeks want to see the nuts and bolts that make up such an amazing machine. I took a stroll down to the inventory room in our DAL05 data center in hopes that they had one of our E7-4850s available for a quick photo shoot to share with customers, and I was in luck.

The only way to truly admire a server is to put it through its paces in production, but getting to see a few pictures of the server might be a distance second.

When you see the 2U face of the server in a rack, it’s a little unassuming. You can load it up with six of our 3TB SATA hard drives for a total of 18TB of storage if you’re looking for a ton of space, and if you’re focused on phenomenal disk IO to go along with your unbelievable compute power, you can opt for SSDs. If you still need more space,can order a 4U version fill ten drive bays!

The real stars of the show when it comes to the E7-4850 server are nestled right underneath these heatsinks. Each of the four processors has TEN cores @ 2.00GHz, so in this single box, you have a total of forty cores! I’m not sure how Moore’s Law is going to keep up if this is the next step to jump from.

With the abundance of CPU power, you’ll probably want an abundance of RAM. Not coincidentally, we can install up to 512GB of RAM in this baby. It’s pretty unbelievable to read the specs available in the decked-out version of this server, and it’s even crazier to think that our servers going to get more and more powerful.

With all of the processing power and RAM in this box, the case fans had to get a bit of an upgrade as well. To keep enough air circulating through the server, these three case fans pull air from the cold aisle in our data center, cool the running components and exhaust the air into the data center’s “hot aisle.”

Because this machine could be used to find the last digit of pi or crunch numbers to find the cure for cancer, it’s important to have redundancy … In the picture above, you see the redundant power supplies that safeguard against a single point of failure when it comes to server power. In each of our data centers, we have N+1 power redundancy, so adding N+1 power redundancy into the server isn’t very redundant at all … It’s almost expected!

If your next project requires a ton of processing power, a lot of room for RAM, and redundant power, this server is up for the challenge! Configure your own quad-proc ten-core beast of a machine in our shopping cart or contact our SLales team for a customized quote on one: sales@softlayer.com

When you get done benchmarking it against your old infrastructure, let us know what you think!

-Summer