DDN A³I vs. Supermicro SuperBlade

Well suited for large data repositories, like video storage, data lake, etc. Wide and deep and does not take up multiple racks. Easily grows with your needs as one can drop in more disks when needed, as you grow.

Incentivized

Supermicro may be well suited if what you will be deploying on the servers is supported, because if you don't, you may have no support at all. In our case, we have had some hardware problems where the support is not efficient compared to other experiences we had (HP, DELL). On the other hand, their servers price is quite good, so it's a win win if you are looking for better prices than other vendors.

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• Large storage array
• Fibre channel storage using RAID arrays
• Each SFA can grow with one master and up to 4 slaves
• Up to PB or more of storage

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• Good IPMI management, detailed information
• Their Redfish API is also a good tool to configure/retrieve information from the servers, good for scalability
• Documentation Online for new updates is up to date (BIOS/FW)

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• The Disk array appliances load disks from the top
• Cabler management is more than 4 feet long. Hard to find a rack it really fits in.
• Interconnects between units need to be more seamless and easier to understand.

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• Their support could be better, it is not the fastest we've got in touch with
• We have seen strange behaviour on some of their servers, it's better to check if the OS you will be running is supported on their support matrix first

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My experience with the support was not that good, it always takes a lot of time to get somewhere when raising a support case. I gave it a 6 because I think they have room for improvement here, It could be good if they would act quicker and send in replacements for faulty hardware.

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IBM is close to the Platinum level but DDN comes in large and cheaper but with a bit less features.

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The supermicro superblade servers are performing really well on our infrastructure, we are running a broad set of applications: voip, JAVA, linux, windows, hypervisors, etc. They are easy to install and configure and the price is a winning situation. On the other hand, The support is not so good, HP and DELL are stronger in this point. If you get any failures on your systems, they will replace them immediately, but supermicro will ask for a lot of information on the case before handing out replacement hardware, which makes it slow.

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• ROI is that it seems very economical for massive video camera storage.
• Dedicate a rack to it.
• Best if all units are next to each other but do not have to be.

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• Their price has allowed us to save money when buying servers on bulk

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