Supermicro Pools Intel Skylake Processors, NVMe Storage In New Rack Scale System

Custom systems builder Super Micro Computer late Wednesday unveiled the latest iteration of its Supermicro Rack Scale Design system with support for the new Intel Skylake Xeon Scalable processors and high-speed NVMe storage.

The new Supermicro RSD, which was officially unveiled at the OpenStack Days conference in Japan, is based on the Intel Rack Scale Design, which disaggregates compute, storage and networking resources and enables those resources to be dynamically combined as needed, said Michael McNerney, vice president of software solutions for the San Jose, Calif.-based company.

"With Supermicro RSD, customers can provision a server with NVMe or other components," McNerney told CRN. "The components can be deployed in the right size, and released when no longer needed."

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The most important point with Supermicro RSD is that the dynamic pooling of the resources is done via open protocols like the Redfish API that manages the scale-out of commodity servers, McNerney said.

"We're not trying to introduce new proprietary protocols," he said. "A lot of this is possible without open standard protocols. But you need a lot of customization and coding."

This is actually Supermicro's third implementation of the Intel Rack Scale Design architecture, McNerney said. "We're seeing a lot of traction in enterprise customers looking to build a cloud-like architecture," he said. "They look at how clouds are implemented and see rack scale as the way to do it."

McNerney would not call Supermicro RSD an alternative to the hyper-scale architectures that Google and other major public cloud companies use.

"Think of it as more of a cousin," he said. "Google has engineers running around to manage everything. Enterprises don't. They are looking for an open option to manage their infrastructures at scale."

The Supermicro RSD offering is available as a configure-to-order infrastructure or can be configured in the field using any Supermicro components, McNerney said. The company also offers it to solution providers who can add their own value-add for their customers looking for a turnkey offering, he said.