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Comment by m3kw9 | Hacker News Reader

I thought this was a meme pump, are these guys actually having some legitimate products or services?

"...are these guys actually having some legitimate products or services?"

rsync.net is built entirely on supermicro head units and, until a few years ago, their JBODs.

Then they got greedy and tried to do the old "certified drives" bullshit with their JBODs and that was the end of that ... now we use the celestica JBODs we source from IX systems.

Head units are still supermicro, though. Fingers crossed ...

It's the oldest, most successful, cheapest and for many people technologically superior server maker that's not IBM or HPE. Many successful businesses were built on their products in the past 3 decades. Most notably Google.

They were always in the list of "you want something that's workstation/server reliable, but you don't want to deal with an OEM who's going to sell you a propriatery case/PSU/motherboard. ISTR Tyan being in the same boat, but you don't hear as much about them anymore.

As a small, very specific footnote: I am unaware of anyone but Supermicro making 3U chassis with a 80mm rear fan. As the ATX rear I/O is sized to squeeze into 1U it means there's only 2U or 88.90mm left for fans and most chassis makers will just go with 60mm fans.

ISTR seeing they did 4U with 120mm instead of dual 80 too. That always looked compelling, because I figured a 4U rackmount would make a neat desktop-style case, but I could never justify the price.

I make my desktops out of 4u chassis. Mainly because they have good airflow. But it does bring one glaring design issue to light. consumer grade mother boards are schizophrenic about their airflow. the cpu and ram are orientated to flow left to right and the expansion cards expect the flow to go front to back. Server grade mother boards have coherent airflow however I have found server boards are less than optimal for a desktop application. they boot slow, are picky about components, and the cpus tend to be slow and wide. So I tend to alternate, one generation I get fed up with consumer grade bullshit and buy a server grade board, the next I get fed up with server grade bullshit and buy a consumer board.

My favorite chassis so far has been this generic one, the fans suck(just buy a new set of good fans right away) and supplied drive bays suck. but look at all them 5 1/4 bays, bays for days. You can put every stupid hotswap bay, fan controller and drink holder gimmick you want in there. and still have room for more.

https://www.newegg.com/rosewill-rsv-l4500u-black/p/N82E16811...

AsRock X570D4i-2t because https://www.reddit.com/r/sffpc/comments/lymbka/asrock_rack_x...

Man, I got a rack of tyans recently and I have to say, its not even a contest. Maybe something was of with that order but 1/3 of the hosts had issues, I suspect at the motherboard level but aside from sending them back a couple times for service support I've pretty much abandon the rack at this point. I'll probably send the machines to the shredder and replace them next time I have a budget cycle.

Supermicro has been around since forever and is like one out of one and a half OEMs who actually sell server building blocks on the open market.

Stock market shenanigans are also hardly a new experience for this symbol, either: Already forgot about the discredited 2018 Bloomberg hit piece? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

Since around 2000 I bought something shy of 1,000 of them for a small server hosting company. Mostly the smaller ones in the sub-$1,000 price range, and we had very good luck with them. With the exception of one year where we had a roughly 100% failure rate on the power supplies (same make, model, mfg as ones we had in service 5+ years), they were just workhorses at extremely reasonable prices.

After the power supply failures we started switching to their "twin^2" units (or something named like that) which were 2U RM boxes with redundant power supplies and 4x semi-blade servers, which again we could provision for the sub-$1,000 price.

I've since looked at pricing some systems from them as an alternative for the Dell servers we've been buying more recently, and oddly enough the prices all seem to be in the $10K+ range. A pretty big shock to see what used to be "dirt cheap servers" up in that range, but the RAM and SSDs really add up. Even though Dell seems to have insane pricing in their configurator for RAM and drives...

Server-grade motherboards that have been widely used for a long time sounds like a legitimate product business. Whether or not they have long-lasting competitive advantage, that is another question.

Softlayer was built on all/mostly all SuperMicro servers up until IBM bought Softlayer and then there were a lot of Lenovo.

As an employee of a customer of Softlayer, the servers were very reliable. I have my personal hosting on a rented SuperMicro server now, and pretty happy with it, even if the hardware is 10+ years old (Xeon Lynnfield) and the IPMI requires ancient JNLP that barely works ... I only barely need IPMI (gotta console in to decrypt the disks on reboots, and it was handy for setup)

I've bought and used supermicro servers since 2004. They sell good hardware without the IBM / HP premium.

I’ve used several of their sever motherboards and RAM. They are good products. There’s one in my NAS right now.

They aren't as nicely made as HP's offerings, but solid, and good value for the price. I'd buy a used Super Micro before I'd buy a brand-new Dell, even if the Dell were cheaper.

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