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Super Micro Computer has gone from an obscure server maker to $60B market cap
- jakehop 3y agoSM has been producing good quality hardware for decades. I remember them from catalogues of my childhood. Obscure is not the right word here.
- gnuser 3y agoI’ve built entire DC’s out of Super Micro hardware, they rock. For example, their quad opteron boards allowed me to make 64 core systems in 2013-era!
- red-iron-pine 3y agonot quite whole data centers, but close. their Atom half-step servers were very, very effective for building out call center routing and VM nodes. Atom has/had some problems with one-off issues like race conditions, but they worked quite well. data center vendor also let us do some non-traditional airflow steps as long as it didn't screw with the hot aisle, so we packed racks with these things front and back
- latchkey 3y agoDisclosure: Building a CSP business around SMCI products. Sorry if this sounds like an advertisement, I'm really just a happy customer. I feel like the reason why SMCI has done so well in this AI round is because their server architecture is best in class and they have been able to support the internal changes necessary for AI workloads. They also support AMD CPUs, while others only offer Intel. 6 years ago, Cenly Chen / SMCI was saying AI was going to be huge and that total revenue would be $36B, in 2025 [0]. We are well past that number now. Amazing how AI turned out to be even bigger than anyone could have imagined, but at least they had some vision even back then. Dell, Giga, ZTS are all behind in their offerings while SMCI is iterating and are now even getting to the point of water cooling and L11 manufacturing. I just received a shipment of AS-8125GS-TNMR2 (8U MI300x) and the thing is an amazingly well designed beast of a chassis. Everything slots together perfectly. If you study the user documentation, the layouts of the internal block diagrams are fantastic and build for speed. We are lucky enough to have been able to open an account directly with them. It wasn't easy and required a ton of due diligence, but working with the team there has been a top notch experience. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzqBuiwkv5I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzqBuiwkv5I
- wmf 3y agoGotta love doing a ton of due diligence for the privilege of (checks notes) buying an off-the-shelf product at full price?
- latchkey 3y agoOh, tell me where you can buy TNMR2+MI300x off the shelf! I checked BestBuy and they were out of stock.
- wmf 3y agoMy point is that it doesn't sound like they're customizing anything for you. It's ridiculous that you need permission to buy GPU servers. I realize there's a backlog but there are neutral ways to manage that.
- codethatwerks 3y agoWholesale vs. retail? They probably don’t want to deal with 1000 HNer accounts buying a single chip and do credit checks on them all (or do retail at all).
- latchkey 3y agoThat's exactly it. Normally they direct you to an OEM partner like Exxact. To be honest, they are really not set up for individual accounts. It was a bit of back and forth with the paperwork to get everything done, which took a lot of time. They asked for everything about the business. As for the direct account, once you have it, it is a golden egg because this way you also have direct support from their teams for anything you need. It is fantastic and I feel lucky to have gotten in.
- Throwawayhahzoh 3y agoThey do do retail: https://store.supermicro.com/us_en/ https://store.supermicro.com/us_en/ Shipped a SYS-531A-IL workstation in less than a week including a weekend as my latest workstation configured with my chosen, albeit from a limited selection of memory, good CPUs and NVME and SATA drives (enterprise options for all of those), all properly kept cool per lm-sensors and smartmontools. I used their live chat to quickly get a couple of answers, it was packed well, and in theory for a reasonable up front cost they'll cross ship a replacement for the next 5 years. When Mr. Rsync.net was composing his message today I was adjusting my scripts to do their nightly backup to his service that uses their servers. For a couple of decades have bought a bunch of their motherboards through resellers for myself and family, and built some rack mount systems for a friend bought I forget from where with excellent results. The current swapping of hardware due to the above purchase took down a system that had been in service for a dozen years.
- bluesounddirect 3y agoFriends don’t let friends drive supermicros .
- renewiltord 3y agoI love this investment because when Bloomberg News posted their SMCI story all the security suckers ate it up and dunked shares. Picked a bunch up at a 50% discount and they rebounded. The problem is that security groupies are really eager for there to be obscure security flaws. HN was full of them. And they have this thing about "respected sources" and shit like that because they don't know how to evaluate things themselves. Your loss, my gain. Haha.
- blue11 3y agoThe article hints at a special relationship with NVIDIA, but it goes back a long time. They didn't move recently to be close to NVIDIA's HQ. They have been there for 30 years. For example, back in the 90s Supermicro was selling NVIDIA products and NVIDIA was buying Supermicro desktops for their offices.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoI wish I could afford to build a home server with these parts. Everything I read about them is great.
- Bostonian 3y ago'Nvidia’s chips became the workhorses of the boom, making the complex computations necessary to create systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Server manufacturers who could ship those chips to customers fastest and in the largest quantities had an edge. Liang said it has been helpful that his base in San Jose, Calif., is just a 15-minute drive from Nvidia’s headquarters in Santa Clara. “Our engineering teams are able to work together from early morning to midnight,” he said. Supermicro’s recent dominance in the AI boom, industry executives and analysts say, also stems partly from its strategy of making electronic “building blocks” that can be assembled into servers in an almost endless number of configurations. Rivals offer a more limited menu to customers. That flexibility has been an advantage in the AI boom, analysts say. Developers of self-driving car technology want different server setups than companies making language-generation AI systems such as ChatGPT. Supermicro can deliver customized infrastructure for both.'
- drakerossman 3y agoWho's their competition? What's their moat, except for being 15-minutes drive away from Nvidia's HQ?
- guilhas 3y agoAs a home user I like their hardware has the least vendor lock in, so when things break it is easier to replace with generic parts or swap around
- throwaway11460 3y agoTheir moat is good server hardware that can be ordered without talking to a sales person that has one goal - determine how much they can milk your budget.
- 1oooqooq 3y agoironically they could only do that by a lack of investor interest. Let's see how many days this last now.
- throwaway11460 3y agoIt lasted 3 decades and they always knew that this is the number one reason why people buy from them. I think it's safe, but let's see.
- Gelob 3y agoThey used to let you order without talking to sales, now they want to validate the config like Dell and HPE. They are slow and don't respond and their ETAs are terrible and often wrong.
- amluto 3y agoThey have multiple friendly, competent resellers who will happily quote their machines, often using online tools, and will often come in around half of, say, Dell’s price. Maybe even better if you want something ridiculous like disks in your machine. This has been the case for years.
- dangle1 3y agohttps://archive.ph/FrBaL https://archive.ph/FrBaL
- rasz 3y ago>obscure server maker First google server racks https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-a-computer-the-google-way/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-a-computer-the-google... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google#Late_1990s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google#Late_1990s https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Google%27s_first_production_server_rack_(1998) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Google%27s_first... were build using Supermicro P6SBM
- bawana 3y agoI guess a company just has to move close to nvidia, label one of its products with ‘ai’ and watch its valuations 10x. Foodtruck.ai?
- m3kw9 3y agoI thought this was a meme pump, are these guys actually having some legitimate products or services?
- ardaoweo 3y agoServer-grade motherboards that have been widely used for a long time sounds like a legitimate product business. Whether or not they have long-lasting competitive advantage, that is another question.
- toast0 3y agoSoftlayer was built on all/mostly all SuperMicro servers up until IBM bought Softlayer and then there were a lot of Lenovo. As an employee of a customer of Softlayer, the servers were very reliable. I have my personal hosting on a rented SuperMicro server now, and pretty happy with it, even if the hardware is 10+ years old (Xeon Lynnfield) and the IPMI requires ancient JNLP that barely works ... I only barely need IPMI (gotta console in to decrypt the disks on reboots, and it was handy for setup)
- throwaway11460 3y agoIt's the oldest, most successful, cheapest and for many people technologically superior server maker that's not IBM or HPE. Many successful businesses were built on their products in the past 3 decades. Most notably Google.
- hakfoo 3y agoThey were always in the list of "you want something that's workstation/server reliable, but you don't want to deal with an OEM who's going to sell you a propriatery case/PSU/motherboard. ISTR Tyan being in the same boat, but you don't hear as much about them anymore.
- chx 3y agoAs a small, very specific footnote: I am unaware of anyone but Supermicro making 3U chassis with a 80mm rear fan. As the ATX rear I/O is sized to squeeze into 1U it means there's only 2U or 88.90mm left for fans and most chassis makers will just go with 60mm fans.
- pavlov 3y agoSuper Micro stock was clearly undervalued even on traditional P/E metrics as recently as 2022. And I believe the reason for the depressed stock price was Bloomberg’s allegations that China was using Super Micro’s motherboards as Trojan horses for spy chips: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/years-later-bloomberg-doubles-down-disputed-supermicro-supply-chain-hack-story/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/years-later-bloom... Bloomberg originally broke this story in 2018, then repeated the allegations in 2021. But AFAIK it was never proven. The Nvidia + Meta connection finally broke the spell and allowed investors to look at SMCI with fresh eyes.
- diggan 3y ago> Bloomberg originally broke this story in 2018, then repeated the allegations in 2021. But AFAIK it was never proven. Isn't that libel? Or something similar at least, not super familiar with US laws.
- pavlov 3y agoMy amateur understanding is that it’s very hard to successfully sue journalists for libel in the US because you’d have to prove malicious intent. A journalist writing a story based on their sources may have been misled by someone with an agenda, but didn’t write the false story with active malice.
- ghaff 3y agoAs someone who has done journalism, that's basically correct. All indications are that simultaneously the story wasn't true and the reporter and all their editors firmly believed it was true. My personal assumption is that they believed the story was solidly sourced but they were misled. ADDED: Standards are somewhat different between private people and public people/corporations.
- GauntletWizard 3y agoI'm glad the story ran, even if it wasn't true - because it opened people's minds to the idea that this was happening. And it is a very real possibility. O.MG is a hobbyist project, but there's no question that the NSAs dirty tricks book, ANT/TAO[1] has something similar, but far more capable. We should all be paying attention to hardware suppliers and making sure that objects are "as-ordered", but today even a standard chip packaging can hide a ton of malicious logic. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANT_catalog https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANT_catalog
- solarkraft 3y ago... and they're not an obscure server maker anymore? What happened? As far as I know, as much as being obscure, they've also been around forever.
- jsnell 3y agoI would have thought every server maker was able to sell every GPU they got their hands on at this point in the hype cycle. If SuperMicro is gaining market share, isn't it just a sign that Nvidia is giving them a bigger GPU allocation?
- solumunus 3y agoThat’s the rumour, NVDA give them higher priority because of a longstanding relationship.
- johnklos 3y agoIt'd be nice if they gave a damn about security. I had clients stop buying them because a glaring security problem was determined to be "not an issue" that they wouldn't fix. It's one thing to say they wouldn't or couldn't fix products already made with the flaw, but it's another entirely to have a culture of security that says, "Sure, this flaw could cause your machine full, unfettered compromise, but because it's not likely to happen and not highly publicized, we don't care." It makes me think they'll treat current and future security problems the same way. Security shouldn't be based on popularity contests. Sorry, but not for me.
- gizmo 3y agoDo you have more info on this? iDRAC doesn't have the best security track record either, but people don't really seem to care.
- dualboot 3y agoIndeed. An OOB interface is something you should always handle like radioactive material. It's volatile, powerful, and should be handled with extreme care and caution.
- johnklos 3y agoIn a nutshell, the problem is this. I don't know whether this has changed, but this was true as of 2018 / 2019. Most of their motherboards have IPMI with a separate a management port. A good number of them share IPMI management with the motherboard's primary ethernet port by default if nothing is plugged in to the management port. The motherboards have no way to configure them to NOT share the primary ethernet port beyond having the full stack of software needed to configure their IPMI. What this means is that there're no jumpers one can change and no settings accessible in the BIOS that can force IPMI to stay on its own port, so if a BIOS gets reset, the battery dies or even just temporarily fails to provide power (like if it's being shipped by air and gets very cold), or you want to ship servers directly to a datacenter, the machine is 100% ownable on the public interface BY DEFAULT unless the management port is connected (and even then sometimes it decides to share the primary port - probably a function of link negotiation speed with the switch). Sure, it's not a common occurrence, but it happens. The solution for all the servers we already had deployed? We got ethernet loopback plugs for every one of them where the IPMI port wasn't already connected to a switch we administered. A reasonable response: "Sure, that could be a problem sometimes. We can't change motherboards we already sold, but we'll bring this up with our design team so there'll be a jumper you can change so sharing will never happen, even with a reset BIOS." Their response: "This isn't a security issue."
- markhahn 3y agohasn't been obscure for a long time. this says more about WSJ-reading "enterprise" IT than anything else.
- dboreham 3y agoIf only I had known they were listed in the US. Just assumed they were an offshore company (based on their pretty terrible support). Disclosure: long time user.