Supermicro does micro server for SOHOs
Because you can't have too many servers
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Motherboard and server maker Supermicro is not a tier-one corporate-server supplier itself, but it does sell a lot of motherboards to tier-two players. Now wants to get a piece of the small-office/home-office (SOHO) market with a new single-socket mini-tower server.
Super Micro Computer, which also calls itself Supermicro just to confuse the Capitalization and Spacing Police, says its new SuperServer 5035L-iB is "truly optimized" for small offices and home offices.
The 5035L-iB may look like any other tower box, but it's different from most commercial servers in that it assumes you only need one processor socket and you want a small, quiet, energy-efficient machine to tuck away into the corner of a room.
The mini-tower is based on Supermicro's own single-socket X7SLM-L motherboard, which can accept Pentium 4, Celeron D, Pentium D, or Core 2 Duo processors from Intel. It has two slots for up to 2GB of DDR2 main memory - just enough to be useful in a modern server.
The 5035L-iB has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, two PCI-Express slots and two PCI slots, and four internal SATA drive bays with a hardware controller that supports RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10. A quiet 300-watt power supply is rated at 80 per cent efficiency - better than a lot of PCs, but not top-of-the-line in the server market. While Supermicro does say that the 5035L-iB is cost-effective, it hasn't yet announced pricing.
This SOHO machine, by the way, is not to be confused with the company's recently launched SuperWorkstation 5036-TB mid-tower, which is based on Intel's new Nehalem (aka Core i7) processor.
The 5036-TB, which looks exactly like a deskside server (because there's really no practical difference) is also a single-socket box, but it's based on Supermicro's X8SAX motherboard and Intel's X58 Express chipset, and supports quad-core Nehalem processors. It's also nearly identical to the Core i7 server launched today by whitebox server-maker Visionman Computers.
The X8SAX board inside the Supermicro workstation and the Visionman server has six DDR3 memory slots spread across three memory channels, and can support DDR3 DIMMs ranging from 256MB to 4GB, for a maximum of 24GB - a far cry from the SuperServer 5035L-iB's mere 2GB of DDR2.
In addition, the X8SAX board has ports for six SATA disks, plus two on-board Gigabit Ethernet ports. It also has one PCI slot, two PCI-X slots, and three PCI-Express slots, and also includes a RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 controller.
Supermicro hasn't released pricing info for the SuperWorkstation 5036-TB, but Visionman is selling its comparable server for $1,800 when equipped with a 2.66GHz processor, 3GB of memory, and four 250GB drives. ®
COMMENTS
Why ?.
Whats the point ?. With the prices of mainstream servers plumiting at the moment.
HP are offiering sill discounts at the moment.
Ive just got some HP Proliant ML370 G5 tower servers, fully kitted out with max redundancy for 1800 UK pounds each !. With Rack conversion kits at 200, it makes the tower server 500 cheaper rack mount version. HP are just trying to shift stock.
If i was supporting a small office, i know which i would rather use.
oy. That's not a review
That's typing up a press release because it's almost christmas and someone wants to pop down to the pubs early.
Odds on that "raid" controller is the crap SATAraid from intel in the ICH known to the linux world as fakeraid, and available on motherboards from every vendor in creation.
the ram? Be ready to test it for faults yourself. (Learn to love memtest, as I had to *after* rma'ing a supermicro 'workstation' a few years back - and getting exactly the same shite back in the door. I did the ram tests myself, then got ram that worked. Glad it wasn't the slots, I suppose.)
The power supply? 300 w? I understand not needing a full bore 1200 w supply, but topping out at 300 is weak, to say the very least. The slavishly copied press release didn't mention, can it be fitted redundantly? Of course not, which is why it didn't come up.
my advice: never buy from "super red dot" as this outfit is known hereabouts. Apparently back in 486 days they did quality builds. Long since past, those days.
Now, look at any major linux vendor's site for supermicro products that have been qualified. Perhaps they've started qualifying them lately, but as of two years ago, they were too effing cheap to qualify their systems with linux distros.
I honestly don't get why the reg thinks this is more or less than anyone else's tower PC.
@AC - Integrated RAID
My dodgy old Asus A7N8X Deluxe* had 'integrated RAID' - that is, a Silicon Image 3112 processor on teh southbridge with it's own BIOS setup, much like an add in card - hardware RAID 0 and 1 can be set up from that, outside the OS, much like an add-in card.
Are you thinking of the Intel software raid in ICH chipsets or something?
I was thinking, for a while reading that article, that one of those with OpenFiler [google it...] or OpenSolaris set up as an NFS share would make a nice wee NAS with RAID5 set up - even if it was software, or ZFS.....but then again, an Atom chipset with a PCI four port SATA card would probably end up cheaper and for a NAS, I can't see the performance being massively slower with the same amount of RAM.
Oh well, back to the drawing board I suppose.
Steven R
*For the record, that board is now about six years old, and is still hapily running a Thoroughbred XP2400 at 210Mhz with a 12x multiplier, RAID0 over two SATA drives, three IDE hard drives, a DVD burner, and an AGPx8 Radeon X1650. Fucking brilliant motherboard, never a problem with it!
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