SuperMicro "Micro Cloud"

 

SuperMicro X11SSD-f System board.

Welcome to SuperMicro's "MicroCloud".  Think of it as a poor man's blade server, except this is a shared-nothing approach.    Well actually, the only thing shared between the nodes is power.  Unlike a Cisco or HP blade servers their is no shared networking, no boot profiles, no shared storage, or aligning up all of the firmware revisions between the blade's BIOS, the virtual NICs, the blades remote management, or any of the other components.  There are trades offs.  Since this is just like having a bunch of really small servers in a small space, the cabeling is, well awkward at best.  On the other hand there is no learning curve for learning all the ins-and-outs for blade chassis systems.

Each 3U chassis holds eight servers, each server has two 3.5" drives, two 1gbp NIC, IMPI (remote management), a PCIe slot, which has a 100gb NIC installed.

So here we have four MicroClouds, which means 32 compute nodes, each has 1gb connection to a switch dedicated for IMPI, a 1gb connection for normal networking, and two 100gb switches for connectivity.  It was decided, maybe not the best approach but it was what we decided on.  Two MicroClouds on the bottom, then 1gb switch for IMPI, then the 100gb switch, another 1gb switch  for LAN traffic that has a 10gb uplink, the thrid and fourth MicroClouds and another 100gb switch.

Here is a blade from an older MicroCloud; this one has X10sle-df motherboards that contain two Xeon 56XX series CPU's.