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.