The Supermicro 2029UZ-TN20R25M is a 2U dual-socket server that is part of the company’s “Ultra” line meant to compete in the higher-end of the server market. We requested this server specifically because it has 20x NVMe SSD bays, it supports Intel Optane DCPMM, and it has built-in 25GbE. Those 20x NVMe SSD bays we wanted to use to show a very important concept in storage, the benefit of direct-attach storage. In our review, we are going to discuss why this is important.

The SuperStorage 6019P-ACR12L+ is a 1U server designed for organizations that need a solution for high-density object storage, scale-out storage, Ceph/Hadoop, and Big Data Analytics. This server is highlighted by Supermicro’s X11-DDW-NT motherboard family, which features support for dual-socket 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Cascade Lake), up to 3TB of ECC DDR4-2933MHz RAM, and Intel Optane DCPMM.

The Supermicro 2049P-TN8R (or technically the SYS-2049P-TN8R) is a 4-socket server that is designed differently from many of the other models we have tested like the Supermicro SYS-2049U-TR4. This server is designed for scale-out applications. It may seem like a slight nuance, but the system is designed differently for that purpose.

The Supermicro X11SPA-T is a single socket workstation motherboard with a range of high-end features, designed to support both Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs and Xeon-W 3200 series CPUs, but its focus is with the workstation hardware on the C621 chipset.