A technology-leading Fortune 100 company has deployed over 30,000 Supermicro MicroBlade servers at its Silicon Valley data center facility with a Power Use Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.06, to support the company’s growing computer needs. Compared to a traditional data center running at 1.49 PUE, or more, the data center achieves an 88 percent improvement in overall energy efficiency. When the build out is complete at a 35 megawatt IT load power, the company is targeting $13.18 million in savings per year in total energy costs across the entire data center.
The Supermicro MicroBlade system represents an entirely new type of computing platform. It is a powerful and flexible extreme-density 3U or 6U all-in-one total system that features 14 or 28 hot-swappable MicroBlade Server blades. The system deliver 86 percent improvement in power/cooling efficiency with common shared infrastructure, 56 percent system density improvement and lower initial investment versus 1U servers. The solution has 280 Intel® Xeon® processor-servers per rack and achieves 45 percent to 65 percent CAPEX savings per refresh cycle with a disaggregated rack scale design.
The Supermicro MicroBlade disaggregated architecture unlocks the interdependence between the major server subsystems enabling the independent upgrade of CPU+Memory, I/O, storage and power/cooling. Now, each component can be refreshed on time to maximize Moore’s Law improvements in performance and efficiency versus waiting for a single monolithic server refresh cycle.
The MicroBlade provides a building block for a Rack-Scale design data center solution. The networking across all server blades is aggregated into just two ports for uplink through an integrated switch, eliminating the need for Top-of-Rack (ToR) switches and complex cabling. With up to 99 percent cabling reduction for the MicroBlade system, airflow is significantly improved, which in turn reduces the load on the cooling fans, resulting in even lower OPEX.
Up to 86 percent cooling fan power efficiency improvement is achieved by sharing four cooling fans and integrated power modules across all 14 MicroBlade server blades. The MicroBlade enclosure is configured with a chassis management module for unified management and redundant 2,000 watt titanium level certified digital power supplies for 96 percent energy efficiency.
Supermicro MicroBlade is shipped with industry standard IPMI 2.0 and Redfish API designed to lower management overhead in large scale data centers. The MicroBlade also supports DP Intel Xeon E5-2600 v4/v3 processors (MBI-6128R-T2/T2X blade server part numbers).
In addition to the MicroBlade, Supermicro is introducing a new SuperBlade® architecture with more deployment options. The X10 Generation SuperBlade supports up to 10/14/20 ES-2600 v4 dual processor nodes per 7U chassis with many of the same features as the MicroBlade system. The 8U SuperBlade® systems use the same Ethernet switches, chassis management modules and software as the MicroBlade for improved reliability, serviceability and affordability. The systems are designed to support DP and MP processors up to 205 watts in half-height and full-height blades, respectively. Similarly, the 4U SuperBlade systems maximize performance and efficiency while enabling up to 140 dual-processor servers or 280 single-processor servers per 42U rack.