For years, the typical server has been defined by the dual-socket market. At the same time, a number of organizations have noticed that crossing the QPI/ UPI bus between sockets is less than ideal. Processors have crept up not just in capacity, but also in price and power consumption which is making many take a look at single-socket solutions again. AMD EPYC has been pushing this space, so invariably, we are going to have an Intel Xeon response. Enter the Supermicro SYS-1019P-WTR solution which is a single-socket server with a full front panel loadout, expansion slots, and in a shorter depth package. In our review, we are going to take a look at this solution.

Many of the servers we review at STH are designed for maximum expandability, maximum performance, or optimizing on a specific density metric. While those are all great goals, that extra level of optimization adds costs. The Supermicro SYS-1029P-WTRT is a 1U server designed instead for cost optimization providing a dual-socket Intel Xeon Scalable compute platform in a small space. In our review, we are going to see how this impacts the server platform.

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.