SuperBlade is a high density x86 Multi-Node Server for Enterprise Cloud, HPC Applications, from Supermicro. They are available in 8U, 6U and 4U enclosures with hot-swap NVMe support, with air or direct liquid cooling.
We chose Dell PowerEdge R series because we need to consolidate a lot of physical load into a smaller number of nodes. Their hardware configuration, specifically for vSAN helps us achieve a high-density load in a very low number of physical servers. On top of that, they have lots of expansion ports, so we can increase our load internally on each other with simple upgrades.
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.
Good price - Compared to other vendors’ server platforms. In our scenario (virtualization) we found out PowerEdge offers the best price/vCPU and RAM ratio.
Customizable - We were able to select optimal memory/disk capacity for our use case. Other platform's minimum requirements were above our needs, hence needlessly expensive.
Good warranty and service - Our project did not involve creating a big cluster with a lot of spare capacity, so the next business day warranty came handy.
The Dell PowerEdge R range is just intuitive when you have skills engineers managing them in-house, although even with new members of staff on the team, the learning curve is very low providing they have previous general service hardware management experience. From the specification through to the management of this range, the usability is excellent.
We consider Dell's support to be best-in-class compared to other solutions and is also reasonably priced. Their SLA targets have almost always been met, except for minor occasions that have had extenuating circumstances. The service staff is also professional and thorough. Overall, we are very satisfied with the level of support we receive.
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.
PowerEdge R servers was selected by CIO. I think the servers have lots of benefits for our company and are well placed on our projects. In most business cases they are working good and our management have a clear vision to upgrade them to the same brand with better specs. Hope to see this upgrade in close future.
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.
From the perspective of physical server consolidations, when servers spread across multiple branch and remote offices are gathered into a central data center, this simplification process provides ROI in several ways. One, the configuration control, restriction of server access.
Reduce complexity and enable greater standardization of hardware purchases, which lowers costs.
Increased security of the move are important.
The costs of moves, add-ins, and changes are reduced, as well as the costs of travel time and maintenance.
Migrating legacy operating systems to a newer version via rehosting brings similar ROI benefits when it comes to server consolidation.
