Alphard 3C16SN
3U 16-bay storage platform with SAS/SATA/NVMe flexibility, built for capacity, retention and throughput rather than for peak compute.
Overview
The Alphard 3C16SN is a 3U sixteen-bay storage platform built for workloads measured in terabytes and retention days rather than in cores. Sixteen hot-swap bays across a tri-mode backplane take SAS, SATA and NVMe, so a capacity tier and a fast tier can live in one chassis and be re-balanced later without changing the machine.
It is specified for the jobs that fill disks: backup and archive targets, surveillance retention, file and object stores, media libraries, and the secondary copies a compliance policy asks for. The chassis carries redundant power and front-to-back airflow for a standard rack, and the drive layout is arranged so a rebuild is a bay swap rather than a shutdown.
Where a storage platform needs local acceleration — inline analytics, transcode, or an indexing workload sitting beside the data — the 3U body has the room for it. Card fitment is quoted per build. We state the mechanical and power envelope the chassis provides — height, slot width, PCIe generation and available power — and confirm a specific accelerator against it at quotation. We do not publish a list of validated cards we have not tested ourselves.
Why choose the Alphard 3C16SN
- Sixteen hot-swap bays in 3U, tri-mode: SAS, SATA and NVMe in one backplane
- Capacity and fast tiers in a single chassis, re-balanced without changing the machine
- Sized for backup, archive, surveillance retention and file or object stores
- Room for a dual-slot accelerator where the workload sits beside the data
- Integrated and manufactured in India, with serial-level records from the build
Technical specifications
- Form factor
- 3U rackmount
- Drive bays
- 16 hot-swap, tri-mode backplane
- Drive support
- SAS, SATA and NVMe
- Processor
- Dual-socket Intel Xeon Scalable
- RAID
- Hardware RAID controller, configured to the workload
- Expansion
- Accepts dual-slot PCIe accelerators up to the card height of an RTX 4000 Ada in a 3U chassis. Both passive (server-cooled) and self-fanned cards are accepted.
- Power
- Redundant hot-swap power supplies
- Cooling
- Front-to-back airflow, hot-swap fan modules
- Management
- Dedicated out-of-band management port
- Warranty
- 1 to 5 years as per terms
Sixteen bays, and what to put in them
The tri-mode backplane is the reason this chassis suits more than one storage design. A capacity pool on SAS or SATA with an NVMe tier in front of it is one machine here rather than two, and the split can change after purchase because the backplane does not care which of the three a bay holds.
Sized by retention, not by cores
A storage platform is specified backwards from how much has to be kept and for how long. We size the drive layout, the RAID level and the rebuild window against that, and say plainly what the resulting usable capacity and rebuild time are — which is the number that matters when a disk fails at month eleven.
Acceleration, where the data already is
Card fitment is quoted per build. We state the mechanical and power envelope the chassis provides — height, slot width, PCIe generation and available power — and confirm a specific accelerator against it at quotation. We do not publish a list of validated cards we have not tested ourselves.