Super Blade

While tier-one vendors continue to duke it out over whose blade servers are the most quiet, most powerful and most effective, San Jose, Calif.-based Super Micro Computer Inc. is making a powerful case for its own blade offering to be considered among the industry leaders.

Super Micro Computer—long a stalwart provider for custom-system builders—is delivering the SuperBlade system, which the CMP Channel Test Center installed and spent several weeks evaluating. In a nutshell, we found a powerful, easy-to-install, easy-to-manage and price-aggressive solution that should be considered when it comes time to upgrade, consolidate or expand the data center for small or midmarket customers.

Even VARs that provide systems from giants Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto, Calif.; Dell Inc., Round Rock, Texas; and IBM Corp., Armonk, N.Y., should consider Super Micro a potential competitor when bidding on a deal that involves a small or midsize company.

The SuperBlade system certainly has that potential.

A Few Explanatory Notes
When the CMP Channel Test Center told executives at Super Micro that it wanted to review its SuperBlade system, the company simply drop-shipped a four-server system to our front door. There were no questions asked, and there were no strings attached. That left reviewers free to examine the system—using the Test Center's own methodologies and benchmarking—for elements that would be top of mind for system builders or solution providers in a real-world setting.

In follow-up conversations, Super Micro executives told us that in the near future, they will be following the SuperBlade with newer systems that will run quieter and more efficiently.

Out of the box, the SuperBlade fit easily into our racks and the servers were installed within minutes. The solution's enclosure is an industry-standard 19-inch box, designed to house as many as 10 servers in 7U of rack space. The SuperBlade enclosure is built with a Gigabit Ethernet switch with 10 ports and an RS-232 port, a chassis management module, and two 1,400-watt power supplies (one active power supply and one for the backup source.)

The device we examined shipped with two AMD quad-core Opteron blade servers (with four CPUs and a SATA drive) and two Intel Xeon blade servers (with two CPUs and two, hot-swappable SATA drives).

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