THERE WERE THREE standout items at the Supermicro booth during CeBIT, a chassis, a blade and a card. It isn't the start of an off color joke, three parts were in a booth..... just a large variety of goodies.

The coolest one for me was the new SC216 chassis, it packs 24 2.5-inch drive bays in the front panel. The chassis is just that, a chassis, so expect a bunch of different variants for Intel, AMD and whatever else you need. Supermicro also has an SC213 chassis with 16 drive bays and a conventional slim DVD arrangement in the third section.

Supermicro SC216 chassis

The newest blade from Supermicro is the SBE-714D, and it is much denser than the old setup. This one has up to 14 blades in a 7U chassis vs 10 in the old system, they are obviously not interchangeable. The 714D packs a San Clemente chipset, two Xeons, six Dimms and up to three HDs. The HDs make for a very flexible product, RAID5 on a blade is a good thing.

SBE-714D blade setup

We were caught off guard by the Supermicro network cards, there are four initially, all ethernet cards. If you need 10GigE for you chassis, you can order it all from the same vendor. Not a bad idea, 10GigE is coming fast, and price drops like this are one way to hasten the arrival. One of the cards is 'wrong' though, and a prize of three nothings to the first reader who can tell me which one and why.

Supermicro cards

The last thing is not new, just an update of the existing products. The Twin 1U chassis now has a new motherboard available, this time with a San Clemente chipset. Basically it is the same as the old one, but produces far less heat because it lacks FB-DIMMs. µ