The Supermicro AOC-S100GC-i2C is perhaps one of the most interesting NICs that is on the market today. This is a dual 100GbE solution designed for Supermicro servers. What is somewhat different is that this NIC uses the Intel 800 series or Columbiaville networking first announced in 2019. Intel went into production in the summer of 2020 so this is one of the first NICs out there with Intel’s new “foundational” NIC stack. There are some major benefits and changes to Intel’s networking offering here.

Supermicro is best known to most for server hardware. But over the last few years, the company has dipped its toes in the gaming realm. We’ve seen X99 and X299, as well as Z170 through Z390-based motherboards from the company, culminating with the C9Z490-PGW we have for review today.

Back in July, we had the opportunity to have the Supermicro C9 Z490-PGW in the lab to put together an overclocking guide where we were able to successfully push our Intel® Core i9-10900K upwards of 5.2GHz all core at 1.35v without issue.

Supermicro's C9X299-PG300 is the epitome of basic high-end. It's simple, sleek, and strong where it counts.

For years, the typical server has been defined by the dual-socket market. At the same time, a number of organizations have noticed that crossing the QPI/ UPI bus between sockets is less than ideal. Processors have crept up not just in capacity, but also in price and power consumption which is making many take a look at single-socket solutions again. AMD EPYC has been pushing this space, so invariably, we are going to have an Intel Xeon response.

In the world of storage, perhaps nothing says built for a specific purpose like the top-loading storage server segment. When I heard that Supermicro had a new and updated design, and I knew we would be doing a day at Supermicro looking at products, I thought this is a platform we needed to look at.

Many of the servers we review at STH are designed for maximum expandability, maximum performance, or optimizing on a specific density metric. While those are all great goals, that extra level of optimization adds costs. The Supermicro SYS-1029P-WTRT is a 1U server designed instead for cost optimization providing a dual-socket Intel Xeon Scalable compute platform in a small space. In our review, we are going to see how this impacts the server platform.

Hot on the heels of today’s 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable launch for the platform codenamed “Cooper Lake” or “Cedar Island” we have the Supermicro SYS-240P-TNRT. The SYS-240P-TNRT is a 4-socket server designed to leverage the new capabilities of Intel’s new Xeon platform.

The Supermicro 2029UZ-TN20R25M is a 2U dual-socket server that is part of the company’s “Ultra” line meant to compete in the higher-end of the server market. We requested this server specifically because it has 20x NVMe SSD bays, it supports Intel Optane DCPMM, and it has built-in 25GbE. Those 20x NVMe SSD bays we wanted to use to show a very important concept in storage, the benefit of direct-attach storage. In our review, we are going to discuss why this is important.

The SuperStorage 6019P-ACR12L+ is a 1U server designed for organizations that need a solution for high-density object storage, scale-out storage, Ceph/Hadoop, and Big Data Analytics. This server is highlighted by Supermicro’s X11-DDW-NT motherboard family, which features support for dual-socket 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Cascade Lake), up to 3TB of ECC DDR4-2933MHz RAM, and Intel Optane DCPMM.