Supermicro recently announced a 6U, 112 node microserver chassis. With today’s focus on building out high-density cloud architectures with many nodes, server vendors are in a race to increase density. Intel released the Atom C2000 series in September 2013 and the Atom S1200 series at the end of 2012 to specifically address this market. HP made a big bet on their Moonshot project which promises up to 45 nodes in 4.3U. Supermicro’s offering dwarfs that.
With 112 nodes in 6U the Supermicro microserver platform released today achieves 18.7 nodes/ U as compared with HP’s 10.4 nodes/U. The Supermicro design has eight power supplies to provide hot swap redundant power capabilities to the chassis. There are two chassis management modules to provide IPMI services to the nodes. The unit also includes four switch modules which can be configured to meet specific application needs.
Supermicro MicroBlade Features
- 6U standard 19” rack compatible enclosure
- 28x hot-swappable micro blades with 112 independent nodes, each node supporting
– 1x 8-Core Intel Atom Processor C2000
– 1x SATA-DOM
– 1x 2.5” SATA3 HDDs or SSDs
– 2x DDR3 DIMM slots - 2x – 8x redundant 1600W Platinum-Level high-efficiency (95%) Digital Switching power supplies
- 2x – 4x Intel Ethernet Switch FM5224 with 10GbE and 40GbE uplinks
- Integrated Chassis Management Module (CMM)
- MicroBlade system and backplane infrastructure is extensible to support future configurations potentially doubling the node count up to 224 Atom Processors
Overall this is a massive machine that is the first to come in many upcoming high-density solutions. One interesting aside on these products, the microserver market is currently estimated to be less than 1% of the total server market. It was previously expected that the microserver market share would be between 3-5 times that in 2013/ 2014. From what we have heard, the reason for this seems to be cloud providers preferring larger multi-socket systems virtualizing to fit smaller workloads. It will certainly be interesting to see how products like the Supermicro microblade fare in the market.
