Today we are taking a look at the Supermicro Hyper SuperServer SYS-222HA-TN. That is a substantial model name for a substantial server. Inside, we have dual Intel Xeon 6900 series CPUs along with the ability to run ultra-high-end MCRDIMMs and plenty of expansion. Let us get to the hardware.
Supermicro Hyper SuperServer SYS-222HA-TN External Overview
The server itself is a 2U system from Supermicro’s “Hyper” line of servers. That is the higher-end line with more configurability. It is 31.74″ or 806.2mm deep making it a fairly standard depth these days.
On the left rack ear, we get a power button and status LEDs. There is also a giant vent on each side of the storage. This type of design is not just used by Supermicro, but it is common on modern servers, especially those with higher-power CPUs and GPUs.
In the center, we get 8x PCIe Gen5 enabled 2.5″ NVMe drive bays.
As this is a higher-end server, we get tool-less 2.5″ drive trays. This might not seem like a crazy amount of drives, but with modern 61.44TB drives like the Kioxia CD9P or huge drives like the Solidigm D5-P5336 122.88TB NVMe SSD we reviewed, eight drives is now capable of handling between roughly 0.5-1.0PB. Many of our readers have been around long enough to remember when a Petabyte of storage was not just a third of a 2U chassis and instead was a dedicated 8-10U of storage servers or even a rack.
On the rear, we get a fairly classic Supermicro Hyper design.
On the left rear we get redundant power supplies and a riser block.
The redundant power supplies are hot swappable as one might expect on this class of server.
The risers in this server can either support two slots, or a single slot double-width GPU. Next week we are going to show these servers with GPUs, but you can put up to four double-width GPUs in this server.
In our center I/O, there is an out-of-band management port, two USB 3 ports, and a VGA port.
Above the rear I/O we get another one of the dual slot risers.
Below those center risers we get two AIOM/ OCP NIC 3.0 slots. Our server does not have the kit to make this happen, but you can get a kit to allow you to stack a second AIOM/ OCP NIC 3.0 card above the base card we have populated here.
On the right side, we have four expansion slots.
Our riser configuration is setup for two double-width GPUs to be added so one of the risers has a slot that is not populated. Of course, this is all designed to be flexible and configurable.
The risers have one of Supermicro’s newer latch mechanisms but they are still tool-less in this generation.
Overall one can configure combinations of two AIOM/ OCP NIC 3.0 slots and eight full-height slots. We have one configuration here, but this is just one of the options.
Next, let us get inside the server to see how it works.
I dislike when companies reuse their marketing keywords and the features introduced in the prior usage no longer seem to apply.
Example: “Hyper” (as used by SuperMicro) used to mean ‘enterprise (safe server) overclocking’, now it seems to mean: better front and rear I/O, PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs, and AIOM.NICs.
It doesn’t seem to include what was mentioned in this STH article: “Supermicro Hyper-Speed Server BIOS”.
Not STH’s fault.