SemiAccurate saw three new goodies from Supermicro at Computex, and not surprisingly all were server related. With the launch of Haswell-EP still a ways off, don’t hold your breath for much excitement though.
The first new goodie from Supermicro is a new-ish form factor they are calling the Microblade, it is a 6U chassis that holds 112 Avoton sockets. The math behind that is 26 blades in a 2×13 configuration with four sockets each as you can see below. Each socket gets its own SO-DIMM and 2.5″ HDD, a classic shared nothing system. That said it has a lot of density, redundancy, and a single management point for a lot of systems just like a blade should.
Lots of sockets and even more cores in 6U
Next on the list is a little more basic, the 6017R-TDT 1U server. What makes this 2U E5-2600 machine special? 24 DIMM slots in a 1U chassis, a fully kitted out system as far as memory goes. Other than that it isn’t very special but if you run a lot of VMs it is a good thing to have, more memory is never enough there.
Last on the list is the 5018A-AR12L server, and the name should tell you exactly what it does. Yes you guessed it, the old ‘AR12L is an Avoton C2000 (12 or 20W) based cold storage server. Take a little CPU power, add in up to 64GB of DDR3, and finally 12 hot swap 3.5″ HDDs for the aforementioned cold storage needs.
More drives than you can shake a dead file at
This is not an impressive spec list, but fitting it into 1U is a little more impressive. The drives are run via an LSI nee Avago nee whoeveritisthisweek 2116 SAS controller, and even with their flat orientations, all drives are hot swap. Since it is aimed at cold storage, all drives are individually powered up or down via IPMI 2.0, or at least they can be. In short this box is actually engineered to be a cold storage server, it isn’t just a new sticker on an old chassis.
In the end there wasn’t much new on the server front. The delays of the new 2U server platforms from Intel have effectively put a stopper on the whole category, there is little new because there is no new silicon. That will change in a couple of months but until then companies like Supermicro will have little to do other than a bit of evolution here and there. IDF should be a different story but until then the servers above are actually more than we expected.S|A
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Charlie Demerjian
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