Supermicro server question

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Red Squirrel

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Been debating on what I want to do for my home environment as well as my web environment once I start colocating (leasing right now), and I'm leaning towards going all rackmount from now on. Supermicro servers look promising as they seem to be somewhat standard, ex: I can just buy any sata drive and any ram and put it in, vs dell where you have to buy from them and get anally raped.

One thing I'm wondering though, how good are they for replacement parts? Ex: a PSU fails, can I buy a new one from them? I was checking newegg.ca and they only seem to carry one PSU. Is there better Canadian sites for buying supermicro products?

Any other info I should know on these would be good too.
 
I'd ask dashpuppy about canada, he lives there and buys server stuff.

With the supermiro gear, you should be able to use standard off the shelf parts for the PSU.

When I bought the dell we ahve at work, I bought just the server and then bought a ton of parts elseware to save on cost. The ram was all OEM pulls from HP/Dell and the hard drives I bought from newegg.
 
With Dell you don't have to buy drives/ram from them and get raped...you can use pretty much any drives you want, and RAM as long as your buy compatible RAM (which is quite easy, just use something like Crucials memory adviser tool)

However, the Supermicros are pretty decent, I have a 1U rack mount w/Atom for my router. Was a little picky on the RAM.
 
Not to thread jack, but are all the 1U supermicro cases comparable? And can they fit ATX motherboards and desktop processors? What would you use as a CPU cooler?
 
Just bumping if anyone has more info, or a good resource to read up more on these servers.

Been looking at them on newegg.ca and comparing with Dell as well as price to lease from SoftLayer and other hosts, and so far supermicro is the WAY cheaper way to go if I want to colocate, or even as a home server. My main concern is parts though. I want to be able to easily be able to get replacement PSUs, fans and so on.
 
Supermicro may not be the way to go for a home server. I've had a 1u, 2u, 3u, and a 4u tower that was more of a workstation. The rack mount servers were unbearably loud to have in the house. Much louder than the Dell or HP stuff I've had.
 
Red Squirrel said:
Just bumping if anyone has more info, or a good resource to read up more on these servers.

Been looking at them on newegg.ca and comparing with Dell as well as price to lease from SoftLayer and other hosts, and so far supermicro is the WAY cheaper way to go if I want to colocate, or even as a home server. My main concern is parts though. I want to be able to easily be able to get replacement PSUs, fans and so on.
Click to expand...

If it's important to you, such as a co-location, pickup a spare power supply for it, that way if you need to replace it..you're done in minutes.

My 1U SM chassis is very quiet, whisper quiet.
 
We are an all Supermicro shop, running ~80 machines 24x7x365 for TV use, in the 7 yrs Ive been supporting them, we had 1 HDD fail (Raptor in raid1, no biggie) and 1 X7DAE board arrive DOA, as well as one Xeon CPU fail during burn in.
SM's are pretty good, they are a bit on the loud side..but there a server!
We do use off the shelf parts for machines not on warranty any longer..and there are no problems.
As YeOlde mentioned, we did buy some spare PSU's and memory....and they are still sitting in boxes on the shelf (as well as brand new PNY GeForce 7950GT's we have as spares..which are end of life for us too)
We mainly use 2U SM's, although we have a few 1U's...6016GT-TF-FM207 ..great units and quiet too.
 
rays87turbo said:
Supermicro may not be the way to go for a home server. I've had a 1u, 2u, 3u, and a 4u tower that was more of a workstation. The rack mount servers were unbearably loud to have in the house. Much louder than the Dell or HP stuff I've had.
Click to expand...

I'll be building a server room and fully insulate it, so that's not a problem for me. ;)

I just want to make sure it's possible to get spare parts, that's probably my main concern, especially once it's past warranty.
 
Provantage seems to carry a lot of the Supermicro parts. You need to crosscheck with Supermicro's site to get the part number, and then go to Provantage. I helped a friend purchase a Supermicro case (cse-512-200 in beige), plus the 20pin extension power/reset/led cable so that he could hook up an Intel mobo (the Atom board when it first came out) in the Supermicro case. Supermicro cases (the 1Us) seem to be custom made for their motherboards. The backplate would only fit Supermicro's own boards (they customized placement of Parallel ports, USB ports, etc) and the Intel backplate (from an Atom board) would not fit. My friend ended up having to modify the Supermicro backplate to fit the Intel board. Even the PCI slot didn't line up with Supermicro's own riser card. You really need to purchase their motherboard to fit properly in the 1U case I worked with. It was a tad bit annoying.

I also have access to some of Supermicro's parts, due relationships with several of the larger IT distributors.
 
We have a ton of SuperMicro gear at the office. I've only dealt with pre-sales support and its been good. We buy the SuperServers but you can cram in whatever components that you want.

At home, I have a SuperMicro 4u tower with redundant PSUs. Its loud at first but quiets down quick. Its no louder than the Dell PowerEdges I have.
 
The more I read on em the more they sound promising. I think my next server will be one of those. Even the 1U units look quite scalable. I like the fact that they are more "consumer part" friendly.

Another quick question, their hot swap bays are standard right? I just slide the drive right in? Or do they use special caddys that are designed for that particular server model?
 
We use Supermicro 1u appliance type boxes for DNS, Radius, Snort, etc.... These boxes use dual core Atom processors in them. Currently, we use the model 5015A-EHF-D525 for these type of applications.

We also use Supermicro systems for VM servers. Recently purchased 4 x 6016T-6RFT+ boxes. Each has two quad core xeons and 48gb of ram. We got these boxes because of the on-board SAS/SATA raid controller. One secret that is good to know about Supermicro on their raid controllers is that they are LSI controllers. Supermicro usually has these cards (built-in and addon) at significantly lower prices than a branded LSI card.

Use Supermicro's website to your advantage. If you find part numbers you want to know more about (chassis, motherboard model, etc.), USE THEIR SEARCH FUNCTION!! I can't stress that enough.

Provantage is about the best place to purchase their products for individual parts and barebones servers. You can also get barebones stuff from newegg.com as well.

Spare parts for Supermicro boxes are easily available on their website.
 
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