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SuperBlade Features & Price | SuperMicro Server

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Mar 28, 2019

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Bottom Line:
Product Description:
Max Processors/Cores:
Maximum Memory:
Form Factor:
Key Markets and Use Cases:
Price:

Bottom Line:

SuperMicro SuperBlade isn’t the best-known blade manufacturer. Yet this unit by a Taiwan-based vendor, with a presence in North America, is one to consider for those looking for dense, four-socket Xeon blades that don’t have the budget to consider the competitive four-socket options from HPE or Dell.

Significantly, these units are known as essentially trouble free, and their specs show them to be worthy workhorses for many data center workloads. They are also fully scalable, so an SMB on a budget can start with this system for a modest amount, and only add the features (and the costs) that really make a difference.

The SuperBlade isn’t the cheapest option, but its robust list of options and reasonable price make it worth consideration for penny-pinching enterprises.

Product Description:

The SuperBladefrom SuperMicro enhances system computing density by housing multiple blade servers in a single enclosure. The company takes an application-optimized engineering philosophy and years of rackmount server experience to deliver simplified access and maintenance with front-loading nodes. Each node includes up to four 28-Core Xeon Scalable CPUs with 3 TB DDR4 2666MHz in 48 DIMM slots.

In addition, the chassis has support for NVMe/SAS3 HDD blades, optional 100G EDR InfiniBand/Intel Omni-Path or 10G mezzanine HCA, and an optional PCI-E 3.0 expansion card. In total, it can support up to 8 NVMe or 4 SATA3/SAS3 hard drives, and 100-240VAC redundant Titanium Level high-efficiency (96%), N+1 power supplies.

The compute blades are available in half-height and full-height versions. Up to 20 half-height 2-socket blade servers can fit in an 8U SuperBlade chassis. This makes it possible to cram 200 CPUs per 42U rack. The company also engineers blades that are optimized for uses such as enterprise blade server, data center optimized blade, workstation blade, and office blade.

“Excellent experience with the SuperBlade. No problems whatsoever,” said an IT Manager in healthcare.

Max Processors/Cores:

Four Xeon Scalable CPUs/112 cores.

Maximum Memory:

3 TB (6 TB for full height)

Form Factor:

Half height blades (full-height blades can fit in the same chassis).

Key Markets and Use Cases:

Mission-critical, compute-intensive applications

Data centers

SMBs

“SuperMicro has competitive pricing while offering high quality products and services,” said an IT Manager in healthcare.

Price:

Starting at less than $2,000

Product	SuperMicro SuperBlade
Max Processors	Four Xeon Scalable
Max Cores	112
Max RAM	3 TB
Form Factor	Half height
Starting Price	$2,000
Key Differentiator	Budget price, 4-socket Xeon

Drew Robb

Drew Robb has been a full-time professional writer and editor for more than twenty years. He currently works freelance for a number of IT publications, including eSecurity Planet and CIO Insight. He is also the editor-in-chief of an international engineering magazine.