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Intel Server Chassis FC2000 For Cascade Lake

Arriving alongside Cascade Lake is a new server chassis that’s better designed to handle the thermal and power needs of Intel’s latest Xeon Scalable series processors. The Intel Server Chassis FC2000 will come in an array of configurations and accommodate both air and liquid cooling solutions.

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The FC2000 features wider node trays than its predecessors and a more convenient front I/O design. The node trays install from the front of the chassis, and I/O cards and cabling are located at the front of the trays. The chassis also has accommodations for three power supplies, in a 2 + 1 configuration – 1600W and 2100W PSU options will be available. The rack enclosure is a 2U design, with up to four independent warm-swappable compute nodes.
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Air-cooled versions of the FC2000 feature 2 x 80mm fans at the outer edges and 3 x 60mm fans in the power supplies; quick disconnects are employed to link the nodes when liquid cooling is used, which reside in the outermost positions reserved for the 80mm fans.

The chassis management LAN module is situated between the power supplies, and all of the fans and power supplies are hot-swappable. There are four hot-swappable U.2 NVMe SSD trays as well (two per node, with 2U compute modules)

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Above are a few photos of an air-cooled 2P Cascade Lake 2U 1/2 width node, with all of its DIMM slots populated -- there are 12 DIMM slots per CPU socket. As mentioned, this latest generation of Xeon Scalable Processors are compatible with the existing Purely platform. But the higher-powered, multi-die Xeon Scalable 9200 series processors will be sold with the new FC2000 chassis to ensure the power and cooling needs of the processors are met.

The FC2000 chassis can be configured in five ways:
  • 4 x 1U 1/2 width Sleds
  • 2 x 2U 1/2 width Sleds
  • 2 x 1U 1/2 width Sleds + 1 x 2RU 1/2 width Sleds
  • 2 x 1U Full width Sleds
  • 1 x 2U Full width Sled

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