Supermicro servers

[Ipwn 4]

What do you guys think? I know Afrihost uses them and so does Domains.co.za.

The price point definitely makes it something to consider. We at looking at adding them to an existing cluster so immediate Onsite support is not necessary as this is a HA cluster with failover nodes. Next business day will however be required in the event that something goes wrong.

Please share your thoughts / experiences? My only one so far was a personal server I bought from them which was DOA, we ended up getting a Dell.

Edit: sorry thought I would add, domains.co.za has them listed as a partner. Don't know if they actually use them.
Afrihost we saw when a did aged box died a while ago.

 

[Nuro]

We have quite a few, and no issues so far. We use them for both bare metal installs and running various smaller virtual machines. Some of the servers are heading for 2 year uptimes, running CentOS 6.x.

 

[rrh]

I imported one - as a personal PC - many years ago, before there was local agent.

It ran 24 x 7 for several years, until lightning demolished it. No support - other than BIOS upgrades - was required during this time.

The hardware is friggin' awesome.

BTW one of their major clients was Intel; not sure of the situation today.

 

[Murmaider]

What do you guys think? I know Afrihost uses them and so does Domains.co.za.

The price point definitely makes it something to consider. We at looking at adding them to an existing cluster so immediate Onsite support is not necessary as this is a HA cluster with failover nodes. Next business day will however be required in the event that something goes wrong.

Please share your thoughts / experiences? My only one so far was a personal server I bought from them which was DOA, we ended up getting a Dell.

Edit: sorry thought I would add, domains.co.za has them listed as a partner. Don't know if they actually use them.
Afrihost we saw when a did aged box died a while ago.

As you mention, we use them.. a lot, Our entire infrastructure from shared hosting, to dedicated servers to VPS to our domains platform is all on Supermicro and we refuse to use any other hardware in our infrastructure.

As for failure rates, if I take a sample of a random 250 servers in our infrastructure over the last 3 years, we have had:

1x motherboard failure (to be fair, it was faulty before we put the server in and was replaced same day).
6x Raid card failures (I think these all came from the same batch as we haven't had any other issues).
0x Backplane failures
5x PSU Failures (redundant PSU systems - replaced same day).

If you work out the percentage failure rates on these, its tiny.
I can honestly say that supermicro hardware is great.
The largest Providers in the world like Softlayer who have around 500 000 dedicated servers also only use Supermicro hardware.

If you need the onsite, 24/7 support, you can get this through Infrasol as they carry all replacement and spares and these guys are a hell of a lot better than HP or Dell support.

If you pm me your details I'll put you in contact with our Supermicro account manager.

 

[Domains.co.za (Wayne)]

@Ipwn 4, what's very interesting is that the average user does not know what servers a hosting company uses, if they are rented or are owned by the hosting company. We know that there are hosting companies out there that use either standard pc’s or point of sale pc’s as their “servers”.

We took the decision about 4 years ago to only use Supermicro servers and glad we did, as mentioned we use these for everything from our domains platform, shared hosting, VPS’s & dedicated servers

 

[Fulcrum29]

We only do Dell and Supermicro as per agreement, our own environment is +70% custom build Supermicro servers. Although Supermicro established SA as a territory, they don’t provide the tools (programs) themselves and have like two workshops per year in SA, hosted by their local distributors etc.

Personally I’m Dell all the way. We scratched HP servers in SA due to service levels.

 

[Ipwn 4]

@Ipwn 4, what's very interesting is that the average user does not know what servers a hosting company uses, if they are rented or are owned by the hosting company. We know that there are hosting companies out there that use either standard pc’s or point of sale pc’s as their “servers”.

We took the decision about 4 years ago to only use Supermicro servers and glad we did, as mentioned we use these for everything from our domains platform, shared hosting, VPS’s & dedicated servers

very true Wayne, I was very shocked when I visited a DC for the first time.
I have expecting rows and rows of Dell/HP racks/blades and ended up seeing loads and load of Gigabyte Micro ATX PC cases with external HDD's hanging from them...

Thanks for the feedback from you side, if I use our infrastructure as comparison, we have seen far greater failure rates on Dell hardware over the years (far smaller smaller which makes it worse). Will send Murmaider a PM to get hold of your account manager.

@Fulcrum, Agree with you re HP, service levels are ridiculous.

 

[RNJudas]

Memories... All those DC's... All those 4-6U towers standing around... Irony...

Supermicro is decent. I have always appreciated their servers. Cant say I have ever had any issues but in most cases we have always aimed to replace legacy systems before the 3 year mark.

I can give you an idea of what I have seen by host level.

From experience in working with them:
Domains: Mostly Supermicro, as per their own mention.
RSAWeb: Almost completely Dell, with an abundance of Netapps.
Web-Africa: Its been a while but last I knew these were desktop PC's.
Afrihost: From the look of things I could swear this was cardboard, but hey if its Supermicro, then wtf :/
Cybersmart: Supermicro mostly with a few Dell's about.
Hostking: Undetermined at the moment, will revert back.

When getting servers though, always check what the cost will be either to replace them within legacy periods as well as what SLA's can be provided at what cost and level from the manufacturer.

1 or 2 failed raids/nics and MOBA issue here and there is not a trainsmash.

 

[Telasera]

We only use Supermicro hardware for all of our servers both internal and client facing infrastructure.
There is local support for RMA's and the ability to fully customise them to your requirements makes them very attractive.

The days of using desktop hardware for hosting are far gone as the power/rack-space density is far to costly let alone the reliability of the components are not that same as server/enterprise gear.