 It's not exactly unusual for us to dabble in the extreme, the insane, the top of the line. So when I say this might be one of the fastest servers in the entire flippin' world, I mean it. You guys might remember when we took a look at Liquid's Honey Badger, a PCI Express card capable of housing eight NVMe SSDs with speeds in the 28 to 30 gigabyte per second range. Well, this box dubbed the Badger Den sent over by our friends at Liquid has five Honey Badgers in it and can supposedly maintain sequential read speeds in excess of 100 gigabytes per second. That is bytes not bits. Holy sh**! And today I get to put my grubby little fingers all over it and you're gonna help me. Just like Pulseway is gonna help us sponsor this video. Pulseway is a real-time remote monitoring and management software solution that allows you to control systems and support your users from anywhere. It helps you fix problems even when you're on the go by sending commands from any mobile device with their app. Go check them out at the link below. What do you mean you can't even see anything yet? I can see the Honey Badgers! Look at them! One, two, three, four, five. So that's a total of 40 M.2 drives. 40! So to put those numbers I threw at you in the intro in perspective. You could copy your average 4k Blu-ray, which is somewhere between 50 and 100 gigabytes in a second or even less. It would happen so fast there wouldn't even be a Windows Transfer dialog box. It's just moved. Bam! Just like that. Now, Windows isn't actually a great example of how this performance would behave in the real life because I guarantee you there is no way we will get anywhere near that figure on Windows regardless of what the physical hardware can do. But we're still gonna try our best. I have Windows installed on here, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's the dumbest thing ever, but let's do it. It's not even a Windows server. Windows 10 Pro. It's not like it's different. Look at these fans. They got their own built-in shots. These are finger cutters, ladies and gentlemen. 3.3 amps! These are 40 watt fans! 40 watts! Wait, wait, what? Is that right? 12 volts, 3.3 amps. Yeah, at full speed. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. This is 250 watts of fans. Oh, the whole thing comes out. Look at that. That's my- they're hot. You got to be kidding me. They're hot swap here. And they're hot swap there? Like what? Oh, oh, I simply couldn't be arsed to replace just one fan at a time in this server. So I'll just, you know what? Screw it. We'll just toss it and we'll get a whole new bank of fans. Yeah, there we go. That'll take care of it. Now we got 250 watts of cooling. Let's go, boys! Holy mackerel. This has just got a plain faceplate. Got that liquid silk screening on there. This is pretty typical having like modules in the front of these things. So if we didn't have all the PCI Express slots full and we could actually allocate more lanes to the front bays, we could put another couple of these in here and have a total of 24 drives in the front of this thing. And unlike our last attempt to put 24 NVMe's into a 2U server, we've got dual CPUs this time. So hopefully we got enough PCI Express and enough CPU. Yeah, okay. All right. It's only a little broken there. Just throw the whole thing away. I'll get too mad to build me a new one. Nah, it brokey. Look at this! What you're looking at here, ladies and gentlemen, is 128 CPU cores, 256 threads. So these are each 64 core EPIC processors and 32 sticks of 32 gigs of memory running at 3200 megahertz. That is no mean feat when you consider that both CPUs are fully populated. That is fast memory for a server, but as we learned before, it makes a big difference when you're trying to do something like this. So wait, what even is that? 64, 128, 256. Holy sh-nikes. That's a terabyte of RAM. I'm gonna install me some Call of Duty. On RAM? Why not? I could. So two of our Honey Badgers are fully kitted out with 8 by 4 terabytes. So that's 32 terabytes of storage on a single card. The other three just have some poop mix of whatever SSDs Liquid sent over. So we are gonna end up leaving some performance on the table today, but we'll talk about how we plan to rectify that in the future. I should pull out a Badger so if you guys aren't familiar with what a Honey Badger looks like, you can see it. What the devil connector is this? This is so cool! So that's gonna be a PCI Express 16x interface, I guess? Isn't it two? Yeah, it's two of the... No, one's a blank on this one, I think, because there's only one slot on this daughterboard. But I think it probably uses the same connector as the other ones. No, the other ones definitely use different connectors. Oh my goodness. This thing is so cool! This is a Liquid Honey Badger. It's got a PCI Express 16x Gen 4 interface on the bottom and then a very expensive PCI Express switch so that it can use those 16 lanes to address 8 4x NVMe drives that are installed. You can kind of see them. Ah, yes. Here, here, here, and well, basically under this heatsink. And you might be asking yourselves, why would they do it in such an expensive manner when you can get cards like this that'll take 4 M.2s for a fraction of the price? And the reasons for this are twofold. Number one, because, well, twice as many drives per slot. Hey, who's gonna say no to that? It allowed us to effectively double the capacity of this server without having to add, well, more servers, so that's good. And number two, a big part of Liquid's jam, aside from just sending us cool toys to play with, is what they call composable infrastructure. So instead of having servers that have all the CPU, GPU, and storage in one place, you'll have entire boxes that are just dedicated to one thing. So if this was one of our storage boxes, then these resources could be allocated dynamically through software to this server over here, or that application, or that workload, all on the fly and all at full speed, as if that server was built physically using the hardware here, but it's actually somewhere else in the data center. Pretty cool, right? Finally, how do we power this thing? Look at that. That's it. That's 1400 flippin' watts of power in like a gum stick. Wow. Here to kick ass and chew bubble gum. This is awful gum, so it's not even pins anymore. It's like slabs of contacts. These are 12-volt only, which is interesting. So that means, like those 12-volt only power supplies that I showed off that are coming to desktops for improved efficiency, the server world already beat us there. They always get the cool stuff in the enterprise first. I'm waiting for my composable gaming rigs in my house. So it's all on a rack, and I can just be like, okay, boy, you don't need, you know, all the powerful GPU. I'll take that. I'm playing Among Us right now. You can have more GPU later for your Minecrafts or whatever. All right, let's put this thing back together and fire it up. Are you ready to click the button? Yeah, I'm ready to click the button. Look, it's even got lights on the power supplies. Wow. Okay. Three, two, one. I want to hear 250 watts of cooling fans. I did actually set the fans to the lowest noise level. Okay. Oh, hello. There's the power supply. Oh, that's not bad. These are the high performance fans, too. This is an upgrade. Oh, yeah. All right. Oh, there we go. It's not so bad. That's the quietest. Oh, that's not bad at all. Where's the lid? Oh, that's not too bad. Yeah, it's not terrible. Well, we'll have to Cinebench it, right? Oh, 100%. See you later. Oh, my God. 15, 16, 18 seconds, ladies and gentlemen. Like what? What's the score? 49, 944. Now, you guys might look at that and go, well, gee, that doesn't seem that great because a 32 core threadripper can do over half of that. And that's only 32 instead of 128 cores. But you got to understand, guys, this is 64 cores on a single CPU. So you're going to have some limitations in terms of the clock speeds you can run in that. So on that note, why don't we see what this thing can do? There's a couple options. We can either do storage spaces. Yeah, because right now all the disks are individual. Oh, my goodness. There's there's 40, what 42. There's 42 disks in here to see how this goes. We're going to create a gigantic striped volume across 16, four terabyte drives. Windows doesn't even manage to get past the first hurdle, which is combine the disks. Hey, there we go. So this is just 16, four terabyte drives. Yeah. Yeah. Fifty nine terabytes. All right, Crystal Disk Mark. Here we go. Let's pull up our task manager. Let's see how hard we're going to hit this CPU settings. So do you do 32 threads, 32 queues, 32 threads. That's it. Well, I have so many threads, though. I'm giving it 32 threads for everything. Sure. This isn't even all the drives, but. Oh, all right. Holy sh**. All right, Windows. Touche. You touched me. You touched what? That's what it means. Oh, OK. Touche. All right. It means touched. It's a fencing thing. Oh, we can see IOPs too. Oh, that's pretty gross. That's abysmal. Yeah. So lots of gigabytes per second, but our IOPs are actually terrible, which means that there's there's definitely, you know, bottlenecks. I think it's time for us to go to Linux. You ready? You're ready. Well, I'll see in 10 minutes when this thing. Yeah, it takes a while to reboot. Now we've got Ubuntu server fired up. And this is the part where things get a little less visually interesting. But I promise they're interesting. OK, here's something visual. Let's just fire up H-top. Hey, look at that. We got we got too many CPU cores to fit on the screen. Hey. All right, Jake, this is this is your time to your time to shine. I'm just going to I'm going to get a Lysol wipe here. So we pre-made a few scripts with Liquid. We have sequential read, sequential write, 4K random, 4K read. Are you ready for me to do it? Yeah, I'm waiting. I want to see big numbers. Big numbers. That's all I like. I just like big numbers. You know, if they don't mean anything. No, I want big numbers that mean that my is really big. Oh, OK. Well, I can't help you with that. So that's the write speed. All right. So 57. Dang. One Blu-ray per second. This is how my Blu-rays go. That's a lot of Blu-rays, bro. Now, now, now, we're not five Blu-rays. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. 91 Gibby bytes. Ninety eight Gibby bytes. What is crazy town, you guys? Of course, while these numbers are very impressive, they are not necessarily indicative of real world performance. If we were to set up some sort of software raid configuration on these drives, that's because these tests are set up to run the I.O. for each NVMe drive on the CPU that that NVMe drive is physically actually connected to. In the real world, very few applications are NUMA aware, meaning that they don't really pay attention to which cores or CPUs the processing is occurring on. So in those cases, it's very possible that the CPU selected to run a given I.O. operation for a specific NVMe device may not be the one that is directly connected to that NVMe drive. So if that happens, the transfer has to go across the infinity fabric that connects the two CPUs, which can significantly impact performance. Now, we could remedy this by virtualizing new Nuonix server into two VMs and only passing through the drives that correspond to a CPU. But then that would leave us with two shares for our poor editors to keep track of and a lot of added complexity, especially given that in this configuration, we are still expecting numbers somewhere in the range of 20 to 30 gigabytes per second, which is way more than our 100 gigabit per second networking. Did I even mention that? We have a new 100 gigabit per second network switch coming. We're going to hook all that up. We're going to have all the editors running 25 gig. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that. So anyway, it's already way more than we could possibly take advantage of. Just like I'm going to take advantage of your attention watching this video to tell you all about Pulseway. Sorry, needed a second to get Pulseway fired up here. Check it out. Got our one terabyte of memory. I'm covering up our external IP here. Got our 0% CPU usage. Here, I'm going to try running a sequential read test and see if that jumps up a little bit. Hey, there's a CPU working a little bit there. Pulseway allows you to monitor your servers in real time, gives you remote desktop functionality. You can check system resources, logged in users, network performance. You can manage Windows updates and so much more. And the best part is you can do it on the go from your Android or iOS device. You can even create, deploy and automate custom scripts so you can automate your IT tasks like deployments, patching and security, backups and more and their endpoint protection allows you to install Pulseway antivirus across systems and ensure they're fully protected at all times. So try it for free at Pulseway.com or through the link in the video description. Let's show some other interesting stuff that you can do. So you can see your storage. You can get notifications and alerts like if the editors use up all the storage and we can set a threshold like 90%. It'll ping me or Jake on our phones. Be like, hey, you told those guys to get rid of that stuff. Run automation scripts. You can see all the running processes. Actually, we had an issue recently with old WANIC where the CPU was pinned at 100% because of some application gone haywire. And that's exactly the kind of thing that Pulseway is specifically designed to help prevent. So it'll tell you proactively when something is sucking up all your CPU cycles. So if you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out the previous video on the deployment of new WANIC, which this ultimately is probably going to replace. So I christen this one new new WANIC and new WANIC is just dead because those Intel drives, it turns out, are just shoddy garbage. And they won't RMA them for us. So yeah, no, I don't want I'm not going to call it WANIC 3. This is new new WANIC. Oh, sorry, not new new WANIC. All right. See you later. New new WANIC. Should we game on it in a future video? Do you guys want us to put a graphics card in here? Yeah. Yeah.