– Don Clegg, vice president of marketing and business development at Supermicro (www.supermicro.com), says:
Servers haven’t changed much in recent years. This may be a common misperception, but it’s a huge misperception. There have been significant advances in overall processing power, core counts, compute power and density, power efficiency and cooling, chassis and rack enclosures, interconnection technologies, server management, virtualization, etc., etc. Supermicro has leveraged all of these technical advancements to create industry-leading application-optimized data center server solutions. Because one size doesn’t fit all Supermicro uses a server building block approach that allows our data center customers to create and configure systems tailored to their specific needs (vs. a generic “pizza box” approach often used by others).
A key trend involves driving down service costs while increasing up-time. Supermicro accomplishes this in a number of ways, such as powerful server management to remotely manage servers along with increased hot-swap capabilities in its servers to minimize any down time. Blades are often fantastic solutions for data centers and Supermicro has solutions with world’s best power efficiency and density, but there’s also another class of servers, namely Twin™ architecture servers that have gained wide adoption and are gaining market share in this space. Supermicro, led the way with their concept of two or four hot-swap fully independent server nodes in a single 1U or 2U enclosure. Since that early Twin platform, many generations of innovative Twin™ products have been created to enable data centers to easily scale up and out while benefiting from hot-swap-ability and reduced costs by sharing power and cooling among nodes in a single enclosure.
Where are things headed? Many data centers want to drive down their operational cooling costs so that they can continue to grow without exceeding their overall electrical power budgets. Both Supermicro blade and Supermicro Twin™ architectures accomplish this. In addition, Supermicro has designed a family of rack enclosures that improve cable routing and air flow so that cooling costs can be further lowered. In the future, data Centers will become greener and greener. Not just because of their desire to be good citizens (which is important on its own merit) but because of the cost savings associated with improved efficiencies. With its housands of server building blocks and in-house design for fastest time-to-market, Supermicro really is the market leader in server innovation for data centers.
