Xeon dominate Supermicro offering at IDF
September 2012, At IDF Supermicro showed of a number of their high performance server and workstation products using the new E5 quad core Xeon processor from Intel. One of the unique aspects of their product line is the motherboards for the servers and workstations are the same. This brings a new level of quality and reliability to the desktop computing community, and all the units are designed for continuous 24/7 operation.
The featured workstation at the was the 7047AX-TRF superworkstation that features the X9DAX-iF motherboard. This dual processor socketed system supports up to 512GB of ECC DDR3 memory (either 1.5 or 1.35v). This is a traditional designed board that has 2 PCI-E3 x16 sockets, 3 PCI-E3 x8 sockets, and 1 PCI-E2 x4 socket. Using the traditional spacing this design supports an Nvidia GPU solution. For the Maximus configuration, they have several dual Xeon boards that support up to 768GB of ECC DDR3 memory and get the highest performance configuration with 4 Tesla Cards and 1 QD2000 Nvidia card. A key for this configuration is the high airflow chassis that allows the units to stay operational with only the heatsinks on the processors and the GPU cards, and standard open memories.
For high capacity computing the X9QR7 family of motherboards supports quad sockets for the Xeon E5 processors and up to 1TB of ECC DDR3 memory with the Intel X540 Dual 10GBaseT interface. These systems support both SATA and SAS for maximum storage flexibility and PCI-E 3 interfaces. These units are targeted for technical computing, cloud computing, graphics development and HPC applications.
Pushing into the servers, they introduced teir FAT TWIN series which is a 4U server enclosure. This unit can host 2, 4 or 8 servers in a single chassis and allows for shared resources for storage and the larger enclosure allows for higher airflow and operating temperature. These units, like other twin designs feature options for both front and back cabling connections which allow 10GB out the back in the hot aisles and 1GB out the front in the cool aisles of the data center. Like all of their server products, these feature hot swap of components including fans.
A new addition to the hot swap control is the BBP module which is a Battery Backup Power supply. Fitting into the chassis as a standard power supply module, it gives the Fat Twin up to 5 min of UPS backup power allowing an orderly shutdown of the unit and making sure that all processes in memory are safely stored. By using these BBP units, you can eliminate the need for a full standalone 4U UPS per rack bringing you the ability to increase the computing throughput per Sq ft of floorspace.
