Supermicro has a new line of 3U SAS storage systems its punting as "Earth-friendly" boxen. Which is fine. Everyone says that. But let's step back and consider that.

We just don't picture this thing frolicking in a meadow of buttercups. That is — we could picture it, but it would look something like this:

Hmm. That's actually pretty charming. OK, you win this round, Supermicro.

The earth-friendly SC936 storage chassis holds 16 hot-swap 3.5" SAS/SATA drives. It supports a wide range of UP and DP server boards (up to 13.68" x 13") and up to seven full-height, full-length expansion cards.

For Gaia, mother goddess of Earth and bringer of the starry-sky which covers her, the hills and endless seas: the SC936 has 88 per cent energy efficient, 900-watt redundant power supplies. It also sports a fully redundant cooling design and iPass cables that minimize the number of internal cables. Supermicro also offers optional DC power supplies, which is always nice.

The SC936E1 model chassis can cascade up to 240 physical devices, and the SC936E2 model supports redundant data path failover for those mission-critical applications. ®