Kontron, represented by Kontron Australia , have introduced the Kontron KTC5520-EATX, their first foray into the server board market segment, thereby adding a server class category to their portfolio of embedded and basic motherboard products.
Designed with an extensive feature-set and two new Intel Xeon 5518 45nm quad-core processors, the Kontron KTC5520-EATX SSI EEB-compliant server board offers high I/O bandwidth and exceptional reliability and is suitable for a multitude of applications in the medical imaging, simulation, storage and multimedia telecom and data centre markets.
Unique remote management: Kontron use an Integrated Management Processor (IMP) that integrates VGA/2D, BMC, and KVM/VM over IP to support real-time access with full control by keyboard, video monitor and mouse (KVM) and virtual media (VM) by a single local computer from anywhere, at any time. Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) 2.0 compliant using IPMI over LAN, the server board provides the OS-independent and cross-platform interface for monitoring the server system’s temperature, voltage, and fan status, among other items, and permits out-of-band management even when the main processors are not powered-in.
KVM and VM over IP allow administrators to install software from a remote drive (floppy, CD/DVD-ROM, flash device and HDD) to target servers for convenient installation. At the same time, the KVM/VM function enables faster troubleshooting by fixing server problems from anywhere, while IPMI proactively sends alarms about environmental issues that could threaten the server’s services, therefore reducing system downtime and operation costs.
Dual Intel Xeon quad-core processors: The Intel Xeon 5500 processors represent the innovation ‘tock’ of Intel’s successful ‘tick-tock’ model to deliver the next-generation of silicon technology as well as new processor microarchitecture. New features in this particular silicon are an integrated memory controller with 3 DDR channels, which eliminates the memory bottleneck, a greater instruction per clock with improved caches for faster processing per core, and a dynamic optimisation of cache and bandwidth resource usage and power levels for specific workload needs. Moreover, there are up to 8 cores or 16 threads for simultaneous multi-threading, which makes this Intel quad-core processor suitable for virtualisation configurations.
Kontron KTC5520-EATX: Kontron’s unique approach to servicing the OEM marketplace provides customers several advantages when compared to traditional ODMs, Contract Manufactures (CM), or in-house design approaches. First, Kontron leverage technology developed in their standard products to create a market-tested and validated solution to each customer’s requirements. Second, Kontron assume responsibilities for product life-cycle management, again leveraging the rest of their product portfolio, and allowing customers to focus their resources on their core intellectual property. Third, Kontron provide technical support to their customer through the project life-cycle, ensuring that customers have all the technical help required to get the product going in the target application.
The Kontron KTC5520-EATX server board provides one dual port GbE controller for external connectivity, support for iSCSI storage technology and boot-up through iSCSI, and expansions through two USB headers (flash drive compatible), one TPM 1.2 header, one PCI 32 bits/33 MHz slot, one PCI-Express x4 Gen1 slot and four x8 PCI-Express Gen2 slots. The Kontron KTC5520-EATX server board also features six SATA II connectors, four USB 2.0 ports, seven fan headers, VGA, legacy PS/2 keyboard/mouse and HD audio interfaces.
The Kontron KTC5520-EATX server board uses the Intel IOH 36D (I/OAT, VT-d) and Intel ICH10R chipset that offer significant new enhancements to accelerate I/O traffic and lower CPU utilisation in both native and virtualised environments.
Memory options feature support for up to 48GB DDR3 800/1066/1333 MHz on three channels of two DIMM sockets per CPU, for a total of 12 DDR3 ECC Registered DIMMs. Software support includes Windows Server 2008 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 5.2 or later (64 bits) operating systems.