Super Micro closes out record year, eager to cross Ivy Bridge

Good show to these guys. While the rest of the server market struggles, SuperMicro shows growth. Despite the prejudice shown by some against SuperMicro, they've provided some damn fine equipment for my clients and I so far and I fully expect them to keep outgrowing the market. They are shifting a lot of boxes into the HPC space, to cloud vendors and OEMing units for companies like Nutanix. It is, apparently, a good racket to be in.

The only legitimate complaint I've seen from anyone against SuperMicro is the lack of a 4-hour enterprise replacement program. I expect they'll look after this sometime over the next year or two, once their manufacturing capacity can meet the spike in demand that would bring.

At least SuperMicro isn't in the middle of some massive "restructuring" (involving axing how many staff every month) or in some asset-stripping Ichann-driven limbo. The real interesting competition begins when Lenovo buys IBM's server division. Then HP versus Dell becomes Lenovo versus SuperMicro...and that will be an interesting contest.