Supermicro has announced the expansion of its product line with a new series of ARM-based servers as part of the MegaDC family. The new servers use Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max processors and feature a single unified motherboard design that aims to deliver high performance per watt while executing scalable workloads that require very low latency.
Supermicro has announced the expansion of its product line with a new series of ARM-based servers as part of the MegaDC family. The new servers use Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max processors and feature a single unified motherboard design that aims to deliver high performance per watt while executing scalable workloads that require very low latency.
Supermicro MegaDC SuperServer ARS-210M-NR
Supermicro MegaDC
Supermicro’s MegasDC servers were launched in 2020 and were designed for use in hyperscale infrastructure deployments. According to Supermicro, the MegaDC line was, “the first Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) systems designed exclusively for hyperscale datacenters.”
MegaDC servers are purpose-built and flexible and have been optimized for cost-effectiveness and reliability. They also support many open standards, including OpenBMC for customized control over functionality and versioning, advanced I/O modules (AIOM) that support OCP cards, and common redundant power supplies (CRPS) for greater flexibility.
Now with the Ampere-based MegaDC servers, Supermicro can target more workloads where ARM servers are gaining traction such as cloud gaming, video-on-demand, CDN, IaaS, database, object storage, dense VDI, and telco edge solutions.
Supermicro MegaDC Ampere Servers
Supermicro is currently showing four servers available as part of the R12 generation of MegaDC servers. The new product line includes servers with a single Ampere Altra or Altra Max CPU, in either a 1U or 2U form factor, with up to four double-width GPUs or up to 24x 2.5″ U.2 NVMe hot-swappable drives.
The servers also feature an onboard redundant 25GbE SFP28 Ethernet networking using NVIDIA Mellanox CX4, and have been certified for use in enterprise and edge applications in temperatures up to 35°C (95°F) and 55°C (131°F) respectively. The use of highly efficient air cooling allows these servers to operate in a wide range of temperature environments.
According to Ivan Tay, SVP of Product Management at Supermicro, the expansion of the company’s product line with ARM-based servers using Ampere processors gives customers even more choices for their specific workloads. The Building Block design of the MegaDC servers allows for a single socket motherboard to be paired with an Ampere Altra or Altra Max CPU with up to 128 cores per server, up to 4TB of DDR4 memory, and modular design options for maximum I/O, PCIe, and storage.
Market Impact
The race is on to deliver ARM-based servers to the market. HPE has launched Ampere-based servers, along with others, and just recently a new entrant to the market launched with a RISC-V offering. There’s clearly momentum to explore alternatives to x86 not only in the cloud (AWS loves Graviton) but in the enterprise as well.
In this case, Supermicro is applying its manufacturing strength to deliver to hyperscalers more or less preconfigured solutions that will go head to head with the likes of Inspur and WiWynn who also compete with Ampere offerings for hyperscalers. There’s clearly a lot of appetite for Ampere and room for many to deliver these solutions, which are well-suited for the burgeoning world of cloud-native applications.
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