Aberdeen’s New Stirling 277 Is VMware-Ready
To Interoperate Seamlessly With Virtual Infrastructures
Reputations aren’t just handed out.
They’re earned over time by gaining the trust of customers and partners through
consistent results, leading performance, and long-lasting reliability.
Aberdeen has earned its well-deserved reputation
within the industry as a manufacturer of affordable, durable, highly scalable,
award-winning general purpose and storage servers by developing such trust. For
20-plus years, Santa Fe Springs, Calif.,-based Aberdeen has been building servers
tailor-made to customers’ exact requirements and specifications in order to
meet their present and future needs. Over that time, Aberdeen has also met and
surpassed the criteria set down by its partners, including VMware.
Solidified Reputation
The new Aberdeen Stirling 277, a 2U VMware-Ready
server powered by the Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2600 series CPUs and built on the
Intel Romley platform, is but one of countless examples of how Aberdeen has solidified
its reputation.
The Stirling 277’s VMware-Ready designation
means the server can interoperate seamlessly with a virtual infrastructure and that
it has met VMware integration and interoperability standards, says Mike McArthur,
an engineer at Aberdeen. “Each VMware-Ready product and solution category
requires successful completion of specific integration and interoperability
testing,” he says. Beyond being VMware-Ready, the Stirling 277 is also certified
for vSphere Fault Tolerance, meaning the potential of data loss due to
disruption is eliminated.
“Customers can rely on VMware-Ready
products and solutions to be reliably interoperable with a vSphere environment
and to deliver unique features with significant value,” McArthur says. Further,
he says, the designation signifies “VMware’s highest level of endorsement for
products and solutions created by established partners.”
Overall, the Stirling 277’s hardware components
make it well-suited for businesses running 10 to 20 virtual machines on a
single ESXi server, McArthur says. The power and efficiency performance that the
Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2600 series CPUs provide means the Stirling 277 is also
well-suited for cloud computing tasks, he says. Aberdeen offers the Intel® Xeon®
Processor E5-2600 series in a dual-socket configuration. Built on Intel’s 32nm
manufacturing technology, the Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2600 helps companies
meet the demands of developing efficient, secure, and high-performing data
center infrastructure.
Better Hardware, Better Abilities
Among the Stirling 277’s standout
features, says Niso Levitas, manager of research and development at Aberdeen, is
support to configure more memory (up to 512GB), something that’s “important for
virtualization,” he says. “Usually the bottleneck on VMware servers is the
memory, not CPU,” he says. “You can add many more virtual machines with
increased memory capacity.”
Aberdeen makes acquiring a virtualization
platform “simple and affordable,” as well as free of “fancy terminology,”
Levitas says, by offering two VMware virtualization starter kits. Both kits
include two certified Stirling 277 servers providing shared storage and
licensing abilities and hardware redundancy and VMware’s High Availability
features. An Essentials Plus kit includes four CPUs and 128GB RAM and support for
up to six CPUs and 192GB RAM. A Standard Acceleration kit includes four CPUs
and 128GB RAM and support for up to eight CPUs and 256GB RAM.
Other notable features of the Stirling277 include dual onboard RJ45 10GbE ports and support for PCI-E 3.0. The 10GbE
ports are backward-compatible with 1GbE networks and infrastructure, enabling customers
to “utilize their existing network and switches and benefit from 10GbE when
they are ready,” Levitas says. Seven available PCI-E 3.0 slots are built in,
providing ample slots to add fiber storage ports, 10GbE, or iSCSI ports,
Levitas says. The Stirling 277 can also utilize SAN storage, Levitas says, but supports
up to 32TB storage in the server itself “for smaller setups or to utilize
Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) features introduced with VMware Vsphere 5.0.”
Guaranteed Quality
As with every barebones and customized general-purpose
and storage server Aberdeen sells in form factors covering 1U to 8U, the
Stirling 277 ships with Aberdeen’s industry-leading five-year warranty that guarantees
it to be free of material defects during the warranty’s duration and free of
workmanship defects during the server’s lifetime.
Before shipping, every Stirling 277
server is put through a comprehensive burn-in process, as well as a thorough
Quality Control/Quality Assurance routine. Before and after shipping, Aberdeen
has VMware-certified sales and technical staff available to help customers best
apply virtualization in their environment to cut their costs and simplify their
operations. http://www.aberdeeninc.com/abcatg/stirling-277.htm
