Supermicro New Zealand
Blade Server Update
Blade Server Update
30 November 2012
We first introduced the Supermicro OfficeBlade and DatacentreBlade as early as September 2008 followed by the TwinBlade in February 2010. The fundamental benefits of Blade servers have not changed but we feel it is time to update the product range.
On initial release Blade servers in general offered excellent compute density per U of rack space. Alternative "Twin" solutions have since been available however and density is no longer a unique benefit to blades. Fundamental benefits of blade servers that have not yet been challenged are their ease of installation, cabling and management - one 7U enclosure can take anywhere between 2 blades to 20 blades of mixed configurations and they share common components such as the enclosure mid-plane, highly efficient redundant power supplies, networking switches and IPMI-based management modules.
Supermicro Blade solutions are available in 3 varieties:
- Office Blade
- Twin Blade
- Datacentre Blade
The Office Blade is designed and optimised for the small to medium sized business as well as personal HPC applications. It can operate at or below 50dB with up to 10 DP server blades for installing into a small cabinet for locating in an office environment.
The Twin Blade is the most recent addition to the SuperBlade family and represents a breakthrough in blade system design by doubling the number of dual-processor (DP) compute nodes per 7U enclosure from 10 to 20. It supports a total of 40 processor sockets per 7U enclosure and therefore 3840 logical processor cores per 42U rack using the current Intel Xeon E5-series processor.
The Datacentre Blade is designed for data centre and HPC applications with optimised performance & density. While density is not as high as the Twin Blade the Datacentre Blades can accomodate more disks and Hardware RAID SAS.
All blades have N+1 redundant high efficiency power supplies, optional InfiniBand or 10GbE switches, and onboard IPMI 2.0 with KVM over IP and remote Virtual Media over LAN.
The latest Datacentre Processor Blades support:
- 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2600 series processor 130W TDP
- 256GB DDR3 ECC REG memory
- Dual port Intel i350 Gigabit Ethernet
- 3x 2.5" hot-plug drive bays for SATA, SAS or SSD
- Integrated Matrox G200 graphics, IPMI 2.0 with KVM over IP and virtual media, optional QDR InfiniBand or 10GbE HCA
| OfficeBlade | DataCentreBlade | TwinBlade | |
| Nodes per 7U | 10 | 14 | 20 |
| Node types | Intel DP, AMD DP/QP | Intel DP | Intel DP |
| Enclosure | SBE-710Q/E | SBE-714D/E | SBE-720D/E |
| Blade options | SBI-7125/6/7 SBA-7121/41 |
SBI-7425 SBI-7426 SBI-7427 |
SBI-7226/7 (+ 10-Blade options) |
| Module options | 2 x CMM 2 x GEM 2 x IB QDR* |
2 x CMM* 2 x GEM* 1 x IB DDR* |
1 x CMM 2 x GEM 2 x IB QDR* |
CMM = Chassis Management Module, GEM = Gigabit Ethernet Module, IB = Infiniband, * E enclosure only
Supermicro New Zealand
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