Fresh Super Micro kit pushes the ultra low-voltage limits

Efficiency you can't hear

By Ashlee Vance, 2nd April 2008

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IDF Super Micro continues to impress with its server gear. The vendor this week released new versions of its blade and 1U designs that make use of Intel's "San Clemente" 5100 chipset built to work with low power processors.

The fresh SuperBlade and 1U Twin boxes boast some rather strong performance per watt figures.

For example, the SBI-7425C shows 93 per cent energy efficiency – about the best you'll find with an x86 server – and .27 gigaflops per watt. The system slots into the 7U DatacenterBlade chassis, which can hold up to 14 servers.

Super Micro is also touting the SBI-7125C blade server, which pops into the 7U/10-server OfficeBlade chassis. That blade platform kicks off just 50dB of noise and was on display here at IDF in Shanghai. The box is, in fact, very, very, quiet. Perfect for hunting rabbits.

The blades support up to 48GB of DDR2 memory, and the SBI-7425C holds three hot-plug 2.5" SAS/SATA drive trays, while the SBI-7125C offers up six of the same hard drives.

Those of you not into the blade thing can check out the 1U Twin 6015TC SuperServer. This machine has a fancy two-server-in-one design that lets you fit up to four quad-core chips in the 1U box. The double-stuffed system eats up 780 watts and uses a 90 per cent efficient power supply.

The 6015TC SuperServer can hold up to four hot-swap drives – two on each server – and up to 96GB of memory. "Each node features a full-bandwidth PCI-Express x16 slot for high-performance expansion card support," the company said. "While the SuperServer 6015TC-T comes standard with twin sets of dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, the high-end SuperServer 6015TC-10G also includes twin 10Gb Ethernet ports for high-bandwidth connectivity."

Serious x86 server customers know that Super Micro makes just about the most powerful, compact gear on the market. Of late, only Sun Microsystems is the only Tier 1 that comes close to matching the CPU, memory, storage and space characteristics of the Super Micro hardware. (This is obviously a sweeping statement that ignores the odd unusually spectacular box from the other large vendors. Please save your hate mail.)

The new Supermicro boxes will work with the various flavors of low-voltage and ultra low-voltage Xeons. ®

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