August 6th 2020, Taipei Taiwan – GIGABYTE Technology, (TWSE: 2376), an industry leader in high-performance servers and workstations, today announced the launch of the GIGABYTE G242-Z11 with PCIe 4.0, which adds to an already extensive line of G242 series servers, designed for AI, deep learning, data analytics, and scientific computing. High-speed interfaces such as Ethernet, Infiniband, and PCI Express rely on fast data transfer, and PCIe 3.0 can pose a bottleneck in some servers. With the expansion of the AMD EPYC™ family of processors comes PCIe Gen 4.0, which is valuable to servers so as not to bottleneck high bandwidth applications. The 2nd Gen AMD EPYC 7002 processors have added PCIe Gen 4.0, and GIGABYTE has included an ever-evolving line of servers to accommodate the latest technology.

G242-Z11: front view

The G242-Z11 caters to the capabilities of 2nd Gen AMD EPYC 7002 series processors. The G242-Z11 is built around a single AMD EPYC processor, and this even includes the new 280W 64-core (128 threads) AMD EPYC 7H12. Besides a high core count, the 7002 series has 128 PCIe lanes and natively supports PCIe Gen 4.0. It offers double the speed and bandwidth when compared to PCIe 3.0. Having PCIe 4.0 allows for 16GT/s per lane and a total bandwidth of 64GB/s. As far as memory support, the G242-Z11 has support for 8-channel DDR4 with room for up to 8 DIMMs. In this 1 DIMM per channel configuration, it can support up to 2TB of memory and speeds up to 3200MHz.

The G242-Z11 is a 2U system built for GPU computing workloads, and has support for up to four PCIe Gen 4.0 x 16 expansion slot bays for GPUs (each GPU connects directly to the processor via PCIe root) and slots for two Low Profile Half-Length cards and one OCP 3.0 mezzanine. This offers a great deal of parallel processing, and the expansion slots allow for adding on networking or storage. Starting with storage, the G242-Z11 has four 3.5” SATA hot-swap HDD bays in the front, and two 2.5” NVMe/SATA SSD bays in the rear. There is also a single mLAN port on the rear for remote management.

GIGABYTE has two models in the G242 series, the G242-Z11 and G242-Z10. Both systems are performance oriented while minimizing the overhead cost and moving from two CPUs to one discounted AMD EPYC processor can have a big TCO impact. Differences in the two models is highlighted on the following table.

	G242-Z11	G242-Z10
PCI Express	Gen 4.0	Gen 3.0
OCP mezzanine slot	OCP 3.0 (Gen 4.0 x 16)	OCP 2.0 (Gen 3.0 x 16)
LAN	- 1 x GbE MLAN	2 x GbE LAN 1 x GbE MLAN
Onboard M.2	-	1
Release Date	August 2020	September 2019

G242 Series Comparison Chart

GIGABYTE provides free server management software (GIGABYTE server management, GSM) for all our server products. GSM is a solution that can remotely manage multiple servers. Compatible with IPMI or Redfish API, including the following components:

• GSM Server: A browser-based easy-to-use GUI software program that can remotely monitor and manage multiple GIGABYTE servers through the BMC of each server node.
• GSM CLI: command line management interface allows administrators to monitor and manage multiple servers through the system's BMC.
• GSM Agent: Obtain other server information through the OS layer, such as processor, memory, hard disk etc., and collect it on the BMC to provide access to the GSM Server or GSM CLI.
• GSM Mobile: Remote management software installed in mobile devices, supporting Android or iOS systems.
• GSM plug-in: allows users to perform server management and monitoring from VMware vCenter.

GIGABYTE GSM software not only greatly reduces customer maintenance costs, but also simplifies the management of hybrid cloud environments. The G242-Z11 has the computing power needed to meet demanding workloads. Its high core-count and high bandwidth can achieve the performance required for mission critical apps, and is a highly reliable server designed for future use.

To learn more visit: https://www.gigabyte.com/GPU-Server/G242-Z11-rev-100
For all GIGABYTE servers, visit https://www.gigabyte.com/. For further enquiries or assistance, you can also contact us directly through marketing@gigacomputing.com.

* AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, EPYC and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Other product names used in this publication are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective companies.