Super Micro To Ship New Server Boards

Charles Liang, Super Micro CEO, said his company's sales have grown 65 percent so far this year, and he anticipates that Super Micro will do even better next year. Liang said he expects sales growth of up to 80 percent in 2004.

Key to that growth will be the adoption of custom systems in the high-power-server space, Liang said.

"We just tried to improve the quality, the appearance, the features, the performance [of Super Micro motherboards]," he said. "We like to make sure the white-box market is able to service mission-critical server applications."

Super Micro, based in San Jose, Calif., this month will begin shipping its SuperServer 6013P-T, which will support two Intel Xeon processors and up to 12 Gbytes of DDR226 SDRAM. The bare-bones system will also support four-channel Serial ATA, and it will have one slim floppy drive and one slim CD-ROM drive.

The $260, 1U system can support up to four 250-Gbyte hard drives, yielding a storage capacity of 1 Tbyte. "We wanted to enable 1 Tbyte [of storage] for a 1U [form factor]," Liang said.

In the next several weeks, Super Micro plans to ship the SS 6033P-T, a 3U, Serial ATA-compatible system that can be used for network storage.

Pricing information for the SS 6033P-T system is not yet available.

By targeting Super Micro's offerings at the higher-end server market, Liang hopes to tap into the significant momentum taking place in the channel.

In the first four months of this year, white-box share of the server market almost doubled,to 30 percent from 16 percent, according to data from CRN's monthly Solution Provider Surveys.