Gigabyte S451-3R0 Storage Server Offers A Great Xeon Scalable Platform With Up To 38 Drives
For use with Cascade Lake Xeon processors, the Linux distributions officially endorsed by Gigabyte for this server/motherboard are Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12.3+/15+, and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS+. Those endorsed Linux operating systems really aren't a surprise and basically amount to the standard enterprise Linux offerings. Over the past roughly two months with this Gigabyte Xeon Scalable platform, I've tested numerous Linux distributions as well as FreeBSD 12 and haven't run into any compatibility issues. Then again, Intel is well known for their Linux hardware support and the Xeon Scalable support itself is obviously in great shape for Linux.
Among the tests we have done so far to date with the Gigabyte S451-3R0 paired with dual Xeon Platinum 8280 processors have included:
- The launch-day Cascade Lake Xeon Linux benchmarks (and follow-up benchmarks).
- FreeBSD 12.0 Cascade Lake testing.
- Windows Server 2019 vs. Linux vs. FreeBSD benchmarks including the likes of CentOS, Clear Linux, openSUSE Leap, Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS, and FreeBSD 12.0.
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 benchmarks.
- Cascade Lake performance optimizations with Intel's Clear Linux.
- GCC 8 vs. GCC 9 compiler benchmarking.
- Linux 5.1 kernel benchmarks.
- Video encoding performance with Intel SVT for HEVC / VP9 / AV1.
Plus there remain many other interesting Linux/BSD tests in the works for publishing over the weeks ahead plus with whatever else comes up from the ever evolving world of Linux/open-source. Some additional data points are also available by searching for GIGABYTE MD61-SC2-00 v01000100 on OpenBenchmarking.org.