I admit when this story dropped I got caught up in it. It was my first time purchasing/managing server hardware and I had just finished getting our 6 node confi

I admit when this story dropped I got caught up in it. It was my first time purchasing/managing server hardware and I had just finished getting our 6 node configuration of MicroBlades up and running. The board picture Bloomberg had as the banner of their story exactly matched that of what I had spent over a year and a half getting my university to order on our (a club’s) behalf. Suffice it to say all logic went out the door that day. A friend and I inspected each of the blades visually, but didn’t see anything. I then called SuperMicro support and asked about the report. The person on the other side had one of the most tired, frustrated, and depressed sounding voices I’d ever heard. All they could do was point me at the company’s official statement on their website, which was down for a considerable portion of time that day. As a Tier 2 vendor, SuperMicro makes decent stuff. A bit rough around the edges and doesn’t come with all the goodies and support you get from Tier 1 vendors like Dell, but man can you bulk buy their gear. At the time, we were able to get 6 blades and a chassis for ~$20K USD (2x10 core Xeon w/64GB memory). Dell had us at about $15K for a weaker configuration of a single blade, and HP wasn’t even on the map.