The chassis and blades are intended support off the shelf server motherboards but require custom switch backplanes for optimum density. All electronic components, including the backplanes, are designed to be field replaceable. Each blade accommodates a single 13” mother board or two half width server motherboards. Each chassis holds 16 blades and 4 switch (back) backplanes. The system can simply be populated with any mix of servers, GPUs, disk arrays, or even network line cards and switches. A user can thus mix and match components, possibly from different OEMs.
Blades are housed in an 8U chassis which provides both power and cooling. Each chassis has positions for 16 compute, storage or networking blades at the front and four ActivePlane switch blades to the rear.
The 16 front blade slots each have two cold plates that are permanently attached to distribution manifolds within the chassis. This obviates any possibility of leaks from quick connect – type fittings. Each rear blade position has a single cold plate.
In addition there is also a slot for a PDU (power distribution unit). In the current version this is 380VDC. As the whole power distribution system is detachable from the chassis, it can be simply changed if desired when the rest of the system is being refreshed.
The 48U tall cabinet provides power and coolant distribution to the chassis. It integrates two energy saving strategies: Touch cooling and DC power. It is fully plug compatible with the Liebert XD pumped refrigerant cooling infrastructure. The rack provides sufficient cooling even for high powered devices when supplied with coolant as hot as 35oC.
See use cases here.