Intel pitches Atom storage platform

Intel is pitching an Atom processor platform for storage boxes in home networks and small office/home office applications. Tandberg announced its DPS2000 4-drive storage box late last month and it uses the Atom chip. The new platform has the newly-launched Atom D410 single-core and D510 dual-core. It also has Intel's 82801IR …

[Dennis O'Connor]

...except Atom IS an X86 processor

Yep, same instruction set as the big boys, just lower power and performance.

[Annihilator]

Indeed

But then I've never seen it written with an upper-case X either. It's x86, as in the x is (was) a variable to represent 2, 3, 4 etc not to mention the 8086. Much like it was Win 9x, not Win 9X.

It's weird, it's like the author is a cross between me and my Dad. Knows technical stuff, mixed in with vagueness. I'm sure the me/Dad hybrid would refer to "external SATA thingies" too :-)

As for WHS and *nix supporting the platform, of course they will - anything that has an x86 (or even x64) will support it. Driver support may be flakier, but even then it all looks like standard stuff, even the disk controller.

6 PCI Express lanes looks odd though.

[Christian Berger]

Sensible use

That's a sensible use. The Atom line just uses far to much power to be used for portable applications. But in a NAS device it makes sense.

[spencer]

"It ain't X86 but it's cheaper"

I though Atom used an x86 instruction set? How else does it run windows OS's?

[Anthony Shortland]

WTF indeed

not only x86... but it also does x64 apparently.

[Annihilator]

Been there, done that

I have an Atom powered NAS at home. Granted I built it myself, but running a copy of FreeNAS, 4 x1TB disks, RAID-5, SSD for boot (well, an SD card, but it's the embedded install) and very very quiet.

What took them so long?

My price to beat: £180 diskless.

[Keith Oldham]

Me too

I've had a home-built dual-core Atom running OpenSUSE 64 bit as a file/print/whatever server since Feb09. Handles my network loads really well and just uses a trickle of power.

[SynnerCal]

Re: been there, done that

So you managed to get Atom board, memory, SD card, case and power supply (one big enough to supply enough juice for the h/w named, plus four drives) for a mere 180 beer vouchers? I'm very impressed!

I am/was in the market for exactly this arrangement - even looked at VIA mini-/nano-itx, but came across the problem that none of the cases suitable were capable of supporting more than two 3.5" drives. Okay, that leaves the obvious alternative of using a "full" mATX case - but wouldn't that look a bit daft with only a baby Atom board and four drives in it?

The only suitable case I found was a Chenbro ES34069 - but that totally blows the budget, since it's over £170 by itself.

[Keith Oldham]

Re : Re: been there, done that

My dual core setup of motherboard/cpu, 2G DDR2, DVD, 500G Hitachi drive & small power supply cost ~£200 - I did put it in an old ATX case - I don't care what it looks like - it's a server

[Annihilator]

Re; Re: been there, done that

http://www.xcase.co.uk/Atomic-Home-Server-p/case-atomic-home%20server.htm is the case in question. OK, it's not specifically set up for 4 hard disks, but 2 hotswap, 1 internal and a 5.25 bay which is easily modified. PSU is more than capable.

I chose this over the Chenbro due to beer voucher contraints as you point out. It would have been my ideal choice otherwise.

I have a strong suspicion that the Chenbro suffers from the inexplicable "NAS tax", which automatically doubles the price of anything that could remotely be described as a NAS.

[foo_bar_baz]

"diskless"

Presumably he got exactly zero drives in that £180.

[Mage]

x86 mostly

Only one or two Atoms are x86 only Most are x86 & x64

Intel sold most of the ARM tech (StrongArm/Xscale) it acquired from DEC to Marvell. They kept one comms SoC ARM.

Marvell have an ARM SoC with multiple GigE and SATA ports.. Used as I/O on some x86 Motherboards.

[Brian Miller]

From the Intel manual

Support for Intel 64 and IA-32 architecture. (http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/manual/248966.pdf)

And it supports SSE3, SSSE3, and Intel Hyper-Threading.

[Henry Wertz 1]

Smart move

This is a smart move on Intel's part.

1) Not as power-critical -- some markets Intel wanted to push the Atom, power is VERY important, and ARM *will* be lower power than the Atom. For a file server? An extra watt or two is not something I'd sweat.

2) At least in existing designs, it seems like a lot of the ARM-based NAS systems do not have a DMA engine, and so they'll max out the CPU while struggling to hit 100mbps serving files (even if they have a gigabit port on them.) The disk controller, and ethernet controller, could support zero-copy (reading disk blocks directly into ethernet chip memory via sendfile() can do samba, nfs, etc. file sharing with near-0 cpu usage) but without the DMA support it won't happen. These Atoms I'm sure have the DMA support of a desktop Atom and will do this fine. This alone makes Atom FAR FAAR more suited for this task than an ARM.

[Steve Evans]

I thought you said cheaper?

I just followed your link, which went to another or your articles from late Feb...

"The DPS2000 will ship in March, come with AccuGard, with a manufacturer’s suggested retail price MSRP) from $2,290 for 4TB"

WTF? For home network? Good greif!

You could buy a 5 bay Thecus, powered by a good old fashioned Celeron and install 5 x 1Gig drives in it for half that!

[The Unexpected Bill]

Intel D410PT/D510M0

For those who want to use these things in their own projects, Intel sells a pair of highly integrated mini-ITX motherboards featuring the D410 and D510 Atom CPUs, and neither one is terribly expensive. Both have a built in gigabit Ethernet NIC, the only thing lacking is SATA connectors. A D510M0 also has a PCI Express slot in place.

Those who criticize the performance of the Atom as compared to some ARM solution haven't (so far as I know) done their homework. I've done my own tests and read of those by others. A lot of the ARM based SoCs for use in network attached storage hardware won't come anywhere near saturating a gigabit networking line, nor will they saturate the channel between disk and CPU. The CPU is almost always the limiting factor in these things--either that, or the programming used is really that bad.

I was surprised to not see the mention of FreeNAS in this article. FreeNAS has happily run on the well known Intel D945GCLF(2) motherboards and also on the much less well known D201GLY(2/2A) with its Celeron 220 and SiS chipset (which was available with full passive cooling). FreeNAS compares extremely favorably to the competition.

One thing must not be ignored...Intel is getting better at this. A D410PT board sat on my workbench all day and ran without incident. It's completely passively cooled and doesn't work up a lot of heat even under heavy CPU usage. This is a vast improvement over the former 945/Atom 220/320 combination that was previously in use.

[Matware]

I always just assumed that..

The ReadyNAS NVX had an Atom processor. Maybe Intel's marketing department have just caught up with what the rest of the world has been doing on for ages.

[Annihilator]

It's an Intel

But it's a Tolapai chip inside the ReadyNAS NVX.

[paul brain]

QNAP NAS

My QNAP 839-pro 4TB iSCSI NAS, runs on the 1.6Ghz single core ATOM and its been doing so for 6 months. Awesome bit of kit that, so much so, I bought one for the house.

I love marketing people, always physically first to the party, always last to arrive mentally.

[Idiots _Quotient]

Reduced Instructions Non x86

Soon There will be a 10 nm Intel Atom For ( Irritating Bowel Syndrome ) Ur ExFat Asses

[Matthias Pfuetzner]

OSes on ATOM

And, to be sure: Use the right OS for your HOME-NAS. You want something, that really protects your data, and that "feature" currently can only be guaranteed by the ZFS volume-manager and filesystem. So, you need to run OpenSolaris on such a box, and luckily, OpenSolaris runs very well on these boxes!

Matthias