The server barebones comes with ASRock's own EP2C602-2T2OS6/D16 motherboard. What's interesting is not so much the motherboard itself, but rather the chassis in which it comes. While the chassis is what fits in a server rack, it has a massive amount of space for storage solutions. It has room for a dozen 3.5" drives on the front of the chassis, and from the rear, six 2.5" drive bays are accessible. This is the double-sided hybrid storage design.
The idea is that the OS, cache, and virtual machines run off the 2.5" drives from the rear, and that all the data storage is accomplished through the twelve 3.5" drives. This is only possible with ASRock's chassis, which was designed in-house.
Mounted on the motherboard come two Intel E5-2690 CPUs, which are stationed right behind the front fans with copper heatsinks coming from them for effective cooling. It also has sixteen DDR3 memory slots, allowing plenty of memory for virtualization and performance. The motherboard also packs Intel's 82599ES and X540 LAN controllers, which can send out 10 Gbit of data each.
"Expecting merely high storage capacity on a server system is just so out of date. We want our users to own more than enough capacity, stability and responsiveness all at the same time," said LL Shiu, CEO of ASRock.
