Industry Voices: Charles Liang

Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro Computer, which supplies about 45,000 server solutions, including motherboards, barebones systems and servers, to the channel each month, spoke with Senior Editor Joseph F. Kovar about the company&s storage, blade servers and virtualization plans.

CRN: What will be the best opportunities for the custom-build channel in the next few months?

LIANG: SAS [serial-attached SCSI]. It outperforms traditional SCSI, but the prices are about the same. Capacity is much larger. SCSI allows up to 14 hard drives, but with SAS, in our lab we have already tested it with 120 hard drives running for more than two months on one controller. It&s very reliable. We started shipping in late August. SAS can actually be cheaper than SCSI because of the number of hard drives on one controller. Today, SAS hard drives are almost the same price as SCSI hard drives. So for the channel, the time to move to SAS is now. It&s the best way to compete with the tier-one vendors.

CRN: Do you see a quicker adoption of SAS than Serial ATA (SATA)?

LIANG: I think so. Customers are already used to SATA. Also, the same controller supports both SAS and SATA. But SAS has higher performance and is more reliable.

CRN: What are some of the new products Supermicro is working on?

LIANG: We already have five models that support SAS hard drives, and we will have 20 SKUs supporting SAS by the fourth quarter.

We will also introduce our blade servers by late 2005 or early 2006. These will have higher densities and higher performance than IBM BladeCenter servers.

In 7U, we will support 10 four-way blades, with a choice of [Advanced Micro Devices&] Opteron or Intel single- or dual-core processors. We will also include a 6,000-watt and a 2,000-watt power supply. The I/O will be InfiniBand, and they will include failover for load balancing. They will also include a 10-Gbit Ethernet port and two PCI Express slots.

Our next-generation blade servers will feature a 7,500-watt and 2,500-watt power supplies. They are already supported by our specifications.

Customers are looking for easy maintenance, reduced cabling and reduced costs. For example, for InfiniBand, cabling is very expensive. We are putting InfiniBand on the middle plane [of the server enclosure] to cut cabling requirements.

CRN: So the rack-mount business is big for you?

LIANG: We have been selling rack-mount servers for five years and now sell 35,000 to 40,000 units per month.

CRN: How about traditional servers?

LIANG: They&re too price-competitive, so we focus more on value-added servers with higher density and which are easier to install. The whole world has moved to rack-mount servers in the last five years. In the next five years, the blade server business will move that way, too.

CRN: How about storage to go with the servers?

LIANG: We have some storage devices—JBOD arrays, chasses—with SAN or SCSI controllers. We provide the solution to the channel, and they use it as their own brand-name product. We provide solutions for VARs, systems integrators and solution providers, one-stop shopping for our partners. We make sure [storage devices] are 100 percent tested and certified so that when they are put together with our servers, they are guaranteed to be optimum for integration.

CRN: Do you have any direct customers?

LIANG: We have a very minimum direct business. There are some exceptions, including Intel for its internal use. Intel buys a lot of early-stage products from us when their new CPUs and other components come out.

CRN: How about technologies to cut the energy and heat related to servers?

LIANG: Our company has developed a complete series of more efficient supplies. For blade servers, our power supplies are over 85 percent efficient. Most rack-mount servers have power supplies with efficiency from 75 [percent] to 82 percent. For motherboards, we use the VRM (voltage regulator module) and VRD (voltage regulator-down) designs for higher efficiencies. We also encourage customers to go for lower-powered or mid-powered CPUs for efficiency. But we don&t suggest mobile PC processors. We are designing a super low-power server, which is scheduled to ship by the end of the year.

CRN: How about virtualization in the white-box server space, using virtualization hooks in the Intel or AMD processors?

LIANG: We have a team focused on virtualization, especially in the blade servers, including virtualization of the CPU, storage and I/O. This will be their focus for the next two years. We will start in this space next year.

CRN: Will that be based on technology from the vendors or something you develop?

LIANG: We like to wait until the CPU picture becomes more clear, especially with Intel. We are working with Intel very closely in this area, trying to make sure our hardware and software designs are close to their architecture, especially in shared I/O and memory.

CRN: Are you seeing more or less competition with tier-one vendors?

LIANG: We have customers that need a 1U server with 15 Gbytes of memory. No tier-one can provide that. Another customer needs a high-performance server with two InfiniBand connections on board or eight Gbit Ethernet connectors on board. Or some want a security chip on board or four hard drives in 1U or 16 hard drives in 3U. Custom systems can meet customers& requirements for specific needs. No tier-one can provide that.

CRN: Are you seeing more Linux in this space?

LIANG: More than 50 percent of our systems are sold for Linux. Some people want performance. They may optimize their applications for Linux and claim it works faster. Some buy Linux because it&s cheaper. A couple buy it just because they love Linux.

CRN: How about Sun Solaris?

LIANG: We have some customers [that] use it, but we don&t provide it. They get it from Sun [Microsystems]. Linux is still the mainstream for our customers, no matter whether it&s for general purpose or performance applications.

CRN: Do you provide any services?

LIANG: We provide hardware management solutions and some software management tools. This lets customers either select their own tools or use our Super Doctor [server management tool]. We&re now developing a higher-end management tool called Supermicro Server Management. We have a couple of patents. It will be available in the next 12 months. It will be an Internet-based, intelligent database to let customers manage and monitor their servers. Most importantly, it will predict server problems in advance.