Supermicro utilizes the AMI MegaRAC line of management processors to provide out-of-band remote management. This is not a complete review of the management features and BIOS settings (that'd take 10 pages per system). But I did want to provide a quick overview for anyone not yet familiar with these capabilities.
One of Supermicro's biggest differentiators is the ability to mount images from network shares. Although that doesn't seem like critical functionality, it is very useful. A common practice is to store drive images on a network share. Using most other solutions, you have to map a network share to the drive, then use remote management to mount those images to the server. The issue there is that if you're installing an operating system, for example, and then lose network connectivity on the system you're using (let's say a notebook goes to sleep when you walk away), the image is no longer accessible and the installation fails. Also, bandwidth is consumed from the administration end point because data has to be passed from the network share to the administrator's machine, and then from the administrator's machine to the server. Directly mounting images on the server takes your admin system out of the equation.
You can see that there are fairly standard MegaRAC power controls in Supermicro's implementation.
The company provides a lot of settings related to user authentication and e-mail alert notifications.
Monitoring is another necessity in remote management, and Supermicro provides access to fan speeds and temperatures. Personally, I use Supermicro IPMIview 2.0 rather than the IPMI management most of the time because it lets me monitor more than one system at a time.
Using the KVM-over-IP features, you can do a few things that SSH, VNC, and RDC cannot do, such as remote troubleshooting from POST. An administrator can use the Java-based application to see exactly what is being shown on the VGA port, and then use his keyboard and mouse as if it were plugged into the server's own USB ports (with a few exceptions). For commands like Ctrl-Alt-Del that normally trigger a local system event, MegaRAC uses macros to get those commands out remotely.
Supermicro's solution exposes the 3 Gb/s SAS ports on Intel's C606 chipset, and their status is easily monitored in the BIOS.
As in the automotive world, green is a key concept in data centers since there are real cost-savings to be had. Supermicro does have a number of power-saving features that are configurable in its firmware.
One more feature before we move on to Tyan's offering: Supermicro offers the ability to control iSCSI settings in its BIOS. This is fairly important if you boot servers to iSCSI shares.
- Three 2P Xeon E5-2600 Platforms Compared: Intel, Supermicro, And Tyan
- The Rules, Contenders, And Test Setup
- Supermicro 6027R-N3RF4+: Layout And Overview
- Supermicro 6027R-N3RF4+: Layout And Overview, Continued
- Supermicro 6027R-N3RF4+: Management Features And Serviceability
- Tyan GN70-K7053: Layout And Overview
- Tyan GN70-K7053: Layout And Overview, Continued
- Tyan GN70-K7053: Management Features And Serviceability
- Intel R2208GZ4GC: Layout And Overview
- Intel R2208GZ4GC: Layout And Overview, Continued
- Intel R2208GZ4GC: Management Features And Serviceability
- Pricing, Warranty, And Support Comparison
- Benchmark Results: Adobe CS 5, 3ds Max, And Cinebench
- Benchmark Results: Compiling, Folding, And Euler
- Power Consumption And Noise Comparison
- Whose 2U Server System For Xeon E5 Is Best?








I agree. Just reduce it a little bit but don't make it too hard to see
Usually? The E5s absolutely crush AMD's best offerings. AMD's top of the line server chips are about equal in performance to Intel's last generation of chips, which are now more than two years old. It's even more lopsided than Sandy Bridge vs. Bulldozer.
As an AMD fan, I wish we could. But while Magny-Cours was competitive with the last gen Xeons, AMD doesn't really have anything that stacks up against the E5. In pretty much every workload, E5 dominates the 62xx or the 61xx series by 30-50%. The E5 is even price competitive at this point.
We'll just have to see how Piledriver does.
Having said that I would suggest you include expected PPD for the given TPF since that is what folders look at when deciding on hardware. Or you could just devote 48 hours from each machine to generate actual results for F@H and donate those points to your F@H team (yes Tom's has a team [40051] and visibility is our biggest problem).
The issue is that other tech sites promote their teams. We do not have a promotive site. Even while mentioning F@H, some people do not agree with it or will never want to participate. It is a mentality. However, it is a choice!
F@H on such a monster? Do the math and you'll see that just after one year of 24/7 operation you would rack up over 3 billion points, putting you in the top 10 for teams and no.1 spot for single user.
That's assuming, of course, that you've forked out $20k for your monthly power bill to run that fully-stocked 42U rack and paid $240k to your utility company for the entire year. Then there's the cost of the hardware itself - around $26k for each 2U server, or around a cool $600,000.
SPEND MONEY FAST
all powerful server are expensive now.
I believe market for cheap but powerful server are big, and no one is working on this area.
I know the profit is not big, but by big quantity it mean big money too
The point is that memory is directly connected to 1 CPU only. Adding a 2nd CPU doubles aggregate bandwidth, but could actually hurt performance, if the software isn't written to carefully to localize data and manage affinity between threads & CPUs.
great work.
That is something that we are looking at. This was more of a look at what is out there for barebones kits. I totally agree that these types of comparisons would be great.
That is already done (but as more of a work around) build a standard PC.
Many high end gaming motherboards work well in a server environment, and can easily handle a high traffic website.
Most web hosting does not need a super powerful server (which is why virtualization is so popular). If you are running a relatively small business and are not doing anything that is hugely CPU bound (eg, rendering) then you can save a bit of money with a decent desktop PC.