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back to article Supermicro punts 'world's densest blade'

Supermicro has launched what it claims to be the "world's densest blade server," as part of its SuperBlade line. A vorpal sword is another very dense blade A vorpal sword is said to be very dense too Unverified, of course. Guinness doesn't do world records for server blades — but as consolation: the heaviest weight dangled …

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  1. Michael Parker

    sorry...

    ...I read that as "Super Mario" now that WOULD be a story and a half...

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  2. Adam Buckland
    Coat

    Just in time...

    ...for the Xmas rush for Windows Home Server.

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  3. Adam Auden
    Flame

    Power/Cooling

    Now find me a hosting facility in London which can provide the infrastructure to allow you to fully populate a rack with these thing. The power and cooling density is just prohibitive.

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  4. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Pirate

    No storage?

    Whilst it looks an amazing bit of kit for consolidation, like all blades it's a compromise, and in this case the compromise appears to have been at the expense of storage. The spec only mentions one SAS drive per blade, and I can't see a fibre channel or iSCSI blade in the enclosure description. Maybe someone more familiar with the Supermicro kit could tell me if it has a SAN capability or is it limited to NAS only?

    In the meantime, can we have a new Vulture standard measure of the vorpal, where one vorpal = 16 cores? ;)

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  5. Magellan

    Targets HPC Clusters

    Matt, I do not know if the SuperBlade has a Fibre Channel pass-through module to SAN connect the blades, but everything I have heard from Supermicro is they are primarily targeting HPC clusters with this product. Most HPC clusters use Ethernet or InfiniBand based cluster file systems for storage.

    A secondary market might be web farms. In that case, only Ethernet connectivity is required.

    The Supermicro site shows the blade having two SATA drives.

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  6. Geoff Mitchell
    Pirate

    3 issues with this

    1. Good luck finding data centres that can provide 15,000 watts of power to each rack. Most are lucky enough to have 3000 watts per rack right now.

    2. How ar you going to cool it? Underfloor cooling will be insufficient to keep the top ones cool. Hope you have extra Euros/Dollars/Shekels/Dinars in your budget for some very exotic APC/Liebert cooling solutions.

    3. 4 sockets are great, but I already need 64GB memory for 2 socket. For a 4 socket solution, I would need 128GB or even 256GB in this configuration for anything useful (database possibly, VMWare especially).

    Assuming you solve for all of the above, this is a niche product for HPCC environments only.

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