Supermicro Launches vSAN HCI Solution

Supermicro, Inc. offers a new VMware vSAN (virtual storage area network) solution optimized to run enterprise class hyperconverged virtualized workloads. This solution also uses the latest Intel AMX accelerator for artificial intelligence workloads.

Compared to the Supermicro X11 BigTwin, benchmark testing conducted by Supermicro showed up to 4.7X higher IO throughput and 8.2X lower latency on the HCIBench benchmark, up to 4.9X faster image classification inference throughput on the ResNet50 model and up to 4X faster natural language processing throughput on BERT-Large model, the company reports.

In addition, the power and efficiency of the Supermicro X13 BigTwin architecture can deliver cost and performance improvement within the same node footprint compared to a similar deployment based on older generation Supermicro systems, creating a case for organizations to upgrade their aging infrastructure, according to the company.

“Supermicro continues to lead the HCI industry with the first Gen5 vSAN solution based on the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors,” says Charles Liang, president and CEO, Supermicro. “Our industry leading Supermicro BigTwin platform supports the latest generation of flash storage media in dense, multi-node form factors optimized for HCI to run vSAN out of the box. This solution enables customers to run more instances on the same hardware and rack space, improving performance and utilization while reducing costs.”

The Supermicro X13 BigTwin platform delivers a balance of compute power, memory density, storage capacity and redundancy for HCI deployments, with vSAN-ready nodes ready to deploy immediately without needing traditional enterprise storage systems. The Supermicro X13 architecture with 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors delivers support for PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives from vendors for  storage performance.

Download the Solution Briefs, which describe, in detail, the Supermicro vSAN solutions:

Supermicro Solution Brief: vSAN for AI
Supermicro Solution Brief: vSAN for HCI

The Supermicro X13 BigTwin solution is available as a 2U 2-node or 2U 4-node configuration with optional liquid cooling. Each node is powered by up to two 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and up to 4TB of DDR5-4800MHz memory. The system runs the latest VMWare vSAN 8.0 software stack featuring the new Express Storage Architecture (ESA) to create a single storage pool across the up to 48 NVMe drives accessible by the four nodes.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.