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evanjrowley | on: Super Micro Shares Plunge 25% After Co-Founder Charged in $2.5B Smuggling Plot
It's sad to see what's happened to SuperMicro. They were one of the few vendors of server-grade hardware fitting standard ATX, mATX, and ITX form factors. In my experience their hardware was always better than the others who attempted to do the same (Gigabyte, Asus, ASRock). These days, motherboards with the features I want are going to be on AliExpress. Ironic considering this latest news is about putting trade barriers between the US and mainland China.
skullone | parent | next
Supermicro is definitely a "you get what you pay for". We bought thousands of servers from their vertical integrations partners, had massive board and backplane problems. Took a few years but they eventually took back over $30 million dollars worth of servers, which were scrapped ultimately because the rework on them was so cost prohibitive. We lost $30M on that even after the $30M in good will refunds. Supermicro also has the lowest bios/efi/bmc/ipmi/redfish out of any vendor we have seen. Just low tier cheap ass shit by a company who can barely survive quarter to quarter without running some new scam on customers, investors, and even governments.
SoftTalker | root | parent | next
Pretty much the same experience (on a much smaller scale). And just open up one of their servers and compare the engineering to a Dell or HPE server. Anything that can be cheaped out is. Corrugated plastic for cooling air channels, FRU assemblies held in place with sheet metal screws, all very bargin basement.
phil21 | root | parent | next
Pretty much. But at one point you could buy 2 to 3 units to every equivalent Dell or HP unit unless you had enough scale to get volume discounts. At $30M I expect the price to be a lot closer though.

Then it’s a matter of how well your engineering/ops org is setup to deal with silly hardware issues and annoyances. Some orgs will burn dozens of hours on a random failure, some will burn an hour or treat the entire server as disposable due to aforementioned cost differences. If you are not built to run on cheaply engineered gear that has lots of “quality of life” sharp edges (including actual physical sharp edges!) then you are gonna have a bad time. Silly things like rack rails sucking will bite you and run up the costs far more than anyone would expect unless you have experience to predict and plan for such things beforehand.

Of course you do have the risk of a totally shit batch or model of server where all that goes out the window. I got particularly burned by some of their high density blade servers, where it was a similar story to yours. Total loss in the 7 figures on that one!

Totally agreed on their BMC/firmware department. Flashbacks to hours of calls with them trying to explain the basics. My favorite story from that group is arguing with them over what a UUID is - they thought it was just a randomly generated string. Worked until one didn’t pass parsing on some obscure deeply buried library and caused mysterious automation failures due to being keyed against chassis UUID… and that’s when they’d actually burn one into firmware in the first place.

It was also always a tradeoff of having to deal with cheaped out hardware engineering with supermicro or with some horrible enterprise quarterly numbers driven sales process with Dell.

EvanAnderson | root | parent
I haven't worked with anything at that scale, but the little bit that I was SuperMicro adjacent I was always unimpressed by the "fit and finish" of the entire experience, as compared to Dell and HP. (Having said that, the entire x86 commodity server experience is shitty anyway. I had a brief time, early in my career, when I did work with DEC Alpha machines. Man, they had their shit together. Stuff was expensive as sin, but stuff worked together and worked well. Build quality was tank-like.)
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cobertos | parent | next
How do you even find motherboards on AliExpress properly? Do you have a methodology to split the chaff from the wheat?
segmondy | root | parent
what chaff? Just search, find what you want and buy. It's like ebay.
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colechristensen | parent | next
Ehhh, I think it's more like the CEO and others were Chinese assets for a long time.

Remember the 2018 accusations of spy chips implanted in supermicro motherboards that everyone denied so strongly?

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platinumrad | root | parent
This news doesn't magically make those 2018 accusations true.
nebula8804 | parent
You either become an Apple or you eventually circle the drain competing to zero margins which forces 'other methods' of generating growth.
deepsun | root | parent
And ideal effective market must have a zero margins. That's normal, what the economy strives for, what customers want.

If some market has large margins, it means it has some inefficiencies.

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