Supermicro Introduces Silicon Valley’s First 3-Megawatt Clean Energy Automated Rack Integration Facility
SAN JOSE, California, January 25, 2018 — Super Micro Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ: SMCI), a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking solutions and green computing technology, today announced that company has significantly increased its rack integration capacity with Silicon Valley’s first clean fuel-cell energy, automated 60-rack burn-in facility with robotic Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) to expedite the processing, delivery and deployment of large-scale datacenter investments.
As one of the world’s largest clean energy automated rack integration facilities located at Supermicro’s Silicon Valley headquarters, the new manufacturing center is now fully operational and increases Supermicro’s rack capacity by 600 racks per month. Perfect for large-scale datacenter deployments, the advanced new 3-Megawatt clean fuel-cell energy integration facility enables the company to burn in 60 racks simultaneously at a single location with inventory, server integration and rack integration all under one roof.
The clean fuel-cell based energy minimizes pollution, resulting in higher operational efficiencies as well as a cleaner, safer working environment. This state-of-the-art facility generates its own clean fuel-cell based electricity on-site which dramatically reduces the carbon footprint while also reducing projected energy costs by $8 million over 10 years. A 3-Megawatt Bloom Energy Server supports the facility’s energy load and is configured to maintain critical operations during grid outages to minimize the impact of public power interrupts. Compared to traditional power sources, the fuel cell delivers enhanced sustainability benefits in many ways: high efficiency, greenhouse gas emission reductions, minimized air pollutants, and reduced water use.
“As our datacenter business continues to grow, we scale our investments to ensure that Supermicro has the production capacity and capabilities to fully service our enterprise, datacenter and cloud customers at our Silicon Valley campus with over 2 million square feet of facilities,” said Charles Liang, President and CEO of Supermicro. “Supermicro shipped 1.2 million units globally last year, and this new state-of-the-art, clean energy facility increases our rack capacity by 600 racks per month and implements the latest automation and robotics technologies to streamline the rack integration process. Datacenter customers can now select from our broad range of industry leading and innovative server, storage and networking products for their large-scale deployments, and Supermicro can efficiently deliver for them.”
A key automation component for the new rack integration facility is the implementation of robotics. Using AGVs to transport racks from the assembly lines to the burn-in chamber helps improve the process efficiency, provides cost savings, and reduces potential safety concerns. Another vital feature of the new rack integration center is L11 Cluster Test Automation. For more details on Supermicro racks, visit www.supermicro.com/products/rack/index.cfm.
Supermicro Rack Scale Design (RSD) is another technology that many datacenter customers have implemented. Based on Intel® Rack Scale Design (RSD), Supermicro RSD manages racks of disaggregated servers, storage, and networking with industry standard, modern Redfish Restful APIs that remain consistent across different vendors and multiple server generations. The latest version, Supermicro RSD 2.1, supports high performance, high density, and disaggregated NVMe storage for dramatically improved datacenter efficiency, increased utilization and lower costs.
The traditional way of scaling up data center resources often involves adding server nodes with fixed computing, networking, and storage ratios. Due to the different life cycles of these resources, a wholesale upgrade of the entire set of server nodes will often lead to premature retirement of valuable investments and underutilization. That is why Supermicro’s resource-saving, disaggregated NVMe storage solution is so important to customers who want to build more efficient and flexible hyper-scale datacenters. For more information, please check out this Supermicro RSD 2.1 resource saving video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84AL3V4HuJ4. Supermicro RSD details are also available at www.supermicro.com/solutions/SRSD.cfm.
For networking, Supermicro’s new 25G top of rack (ToR) Ethernet switches are becoming a popular choice. More cost-effective than current 10G switches, these new 25G switches can seamlessly downshift to provide 10G networking. In addition, they provide lots of uplink bandwidth with six 100G uplink ports. Please click the following link for more information on Supermicro networking solutions: www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/networking.cfm.