At STH, we have been reviewing Tyan servers for over six years. Tyan had a strong relationship with AMD and was a prominent OEM supplier for the AMD Opteron 6000 series generation. After the company was purchased, it focused more on being an OEM supplier and a build-to-order model. Now, the company is using the Intel Xeon Scalable Processor Family launch to aggressively move into a channel model with additional players. That means having servers stocked and ready to configure.
Tyan is Back
For the first generation in some time, we are going to have launch reviews of a Tyan server. Specifically, we have a Tyan GA88-B5631 in the lab that we have already installed GPUs in, since we have been on a multi-GPU series recently with eight and ten GPU systems. Upon booting the Tyan GA88-B5631, we saw this:
Nothing says Tyan is back more than channel product that is shipping and works out of the box. We went back into the STH archives and found this gem from 2011:
Competition is good in the industry and it is great to see Tyan back with a leading edge offering. With a new channel model, VARs and systems integrators can purchase Tyan products without the long lead time of a build-to-order business model. While it will take the ecosystem some time to catch up, this is an excellent development.
New Tyan Servers for the Intel Xeon Scalable Processor Family
Tyan is back with a new line of servers for the Intel Xeon Scalable Processor Family. Tyan has no fewer than ten new server models for the new launch.
Tyan has several Intel Xeon Scalable GPU compute systems coming for the HPC space. One that we have in our lab is the TYAN GA88B5631 which is a single root, single CPU 1U system that can handle a 100Gbps network adapter (such as EDR Infiniband) and up to four dual width GPUs.
When we first heard about this form factor a few weeks ago we were excited as a single socket, single root system using PLX PEX8747 switches is an excellent entry building block for machine learning organizations. Stay tuned for the formal review on STH. It is great to see Tyan has product available at launch.
Tyan also has traditional 4U GPU 2 socket servers. We had seen the previous generation at several AI labs in the Silicon Valley so we expect these servers to be the what new clusters are built with.
Aside from the GPU compute servers, Tyan has four 2U, dual socket servers and three 1U servers. One of the 1U server platforms, the GT62F-B5630, is designed to create a lower-cost server that can be expanded via various OCP mezzanine cards.
We like Tyan’s commitment to the OCP mezzanine card stack. That is an extremely VAR/ ISV friendly move for a company whose strategy is to get back into the channel market.
New Tyan Motherboards for the Intel Xeon Scalable Processor Family
Along with the various server options, Tyan has three base motherboard models including a server/ workstation Tyan S7100 series motherboard:
We think many STH readers are going to be interested to see how well this platform performs. Keen eyes will even see two m.2 drive headers on the PCB further enhancing the maximum scalability.
Final Words
Tyan certainly has a solid product portfolio at launch with the Intel Xeon Scalable Processor family. During our testing we will be giving the company feedback and we do expect that Tyan will have more products coming out in the future. You can read more about the new Tyan Skyake-SP products here.
Aside from the actual product, the major news here is that Tyan is re-focusing on channel enablement. We know many STH readers work as IT resellers and consultants. From what the company has told us, they are focused on bringing Tyan back as an option to quickly configure systems for customers.
I like the fact they’re back in terms of competition, but I’m still tetchy about their Opteron backflips years ago – promising support for features on shipping boards, then dropping the boards from support completely just a couple of months after release and all mention of the features marked “next version buy here” (as I recall, it’s been a decade or more).