Tyan Transport SX TS65-B8253 2U AMD EPYC Storage Server Review

Power Consumption

The redundant power supplies in the server are 1.2kW units. These are 80Plus Platinum rated units. At this point, most power supplies we see that are over 1kW are 80Plus Platinum rated. Almost none are 80Plus Gold at this point and a few are now Titanium rated.

The system is designed for a balanced workload. In our testing, lower-end test configurations were consuming around 0.35kW while we were able to surpass over 0.85kW with heavier configurations and we did not max out the system. This is one of those servers where Tyan has put an appropriately sized power supply in, but there are going to be very large deltas in how much power the system consumes based on configuration.

STH Server Spider: Tyan Transport SX TS65-B8253

In the second half of 2018, we introduced the STH Server Spider as a quick reference to where a server system’s aptitude lies. Our goal is to start giving a quick visual depiction of the types of parameters that a server is targeted at.

As a 2U platform, this is not necessarily going to be the densest from a compute standpoint, and it technically has only half the DIMMs possible on the EPYC platform. At the same time, the TS65-B8253 has a lot of PCIe Gen4 connectivity for SSDs as well as in expansion slot format while still having the ability to accept a high number of 3.5″ hard drives. As a result, we get a system that is very well rounded.

Final Words

The last AMD EPYC 2U system we looked at from Tyan, the Tyan Transport HX TS75-B8252 was focused on high-end compute. In contrast, this Tyan Transport SX TS65-B8253 is designed to be optimized for storage applications and those applications that need a lot of I/O expansion.

With a base of dual AMD EPYC CPUs, we get some high-end top-configuration features such as up to 128 cores/ 256 threads and up to 4TB of memory capacity in the server. We liked the metal fan carriers in the cooling system for these CPUs, but wish that there was perhaps one more fan for added redundancy. At the same time, the big feature is PCIe Gen4 support with seven PCIe Gen4 slots that are a mix of low-profile and full-height slots.

In addition, we have some base features such as the twelve 3.5″ drive bays and two 2.5″ rear access drive bays, but then we get the capability to run four drives as NVMe SSDs as well. This is the kind of system that can scale from a simple low-core count 12x 3.5″ system with two 2.5″ boot SSDs all the way to a system where a number of SAS3 controllers are attached with disk shelves, high-speed networking, and even a GPU for AI inferencing. Video surveillance and analytics would be a good example of where that use case may fit a server like this.

The system itself has some great upgrades. For example, we like the tool-less drive trays, 3.5″ NVMe SSDs, and the addition of the Intel X550 10Gbase-T networking. One can build a nice storage server by simply adding CPUs and memory which greatly reduces system costs over having to add SAS3 controllers and 10Gbase-T add-in cards.

Overall, the Tyan Transport SX TS65-B8253 is a really interesting 2U 12-bay storage platform that leverages the unique capabilities of AMD EPYC CPUs and their PCIe Gen4 support.