The CASwell CAR-5058 rackmount appliance is based on two Intel Xeon high-end processors and a highly configurable network architecture that allows up to 68 high-speed Ethernet ports together with up to four hard drives or SSDs. It uses the manufacturer’s own designed network configuration with up to eight PCI Express connected, proprietary (NIP) modules that each provides a maximum of eight high-speed Ethernet ports for 64 network connections overall. Each network module is connected to the processors by PCI Express 3.0 x8 interface to guarantee the highest bandwidth. Even the NIP-88010 modules with two 100-Gigabit-Ethernet ports each can be implemented for the highest network performance if speed is more important than the number of Ethernet ports. Additionally, a standard network interface card can be plugged into the integrated PCI Express 3.0 slot to expand the number of possible Ethernet ports to 68.
One module slot in the front of the 2U appliance is already prepared for taking a removable hard disk drive (HDD) or solid state drive (SSD). For business purposes that need more storage, the CAR-5058 can be equipped with up to four removable HDDs or SSDs by replacing four network modules with three storage modules.
To power all these different networking and storage configurations, the CAR-5058 is based on two high-performance Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Skylake-SP) using the well established Intel Purley platform. Supported is a comprehensive range of CPUs models from the Xeon Bronze 3104 with 6 cores and a low TDP of just 85 watts up to the Xeon Platinum 8180 with 28 cores. The processors of the CAR-5058 can be combined with up to 20 DDR4 ECC memory modules with speeds of 2666 or 2933 Mhz for a combined main memory of up to 1.5 TBytes. Two common redundant power supply units (CRPS) with 550 to 800 watts each (depending on configuration) provide the appliance with permanent electricity even in case of one failure while also being energy-efficient to save cost when the device is mostly idle. The CAR-5058 is also equipped with an LC monitor in the front panel to display status information and system messages for easy maintenance.
