|
What do your think is the most
compelling reason for the Tier 1 and
2's, major corporate companies and
individuals to buy your workstation and
server products?
Current
rumours are floating about of how
Supermicro now supplies famous Tier 1
companies, such as Cray, H.P. and even
possibly Intel itself. Would you care
to comment on how this has been achieved
and what sort of support levels will be
in place to maintain these high values,
high profile customers?
We like to be open-minded and whenever
we have a good product, we share with
the end users. So, the majority of the
products go directly to our partners.
We have a very loyal, very big customer
base with some big Tier 1 that likes to
work directly with us. Our minds are
quite open though and we have to treat
an old friend as good as possible and we
also like to make some new friends. But
we never like to hurt any old friends.
Supermicro is synonymous in the industry
as one of the leading suppliers of
high-end workstations, server, chassis
and numerous other add-on products for
these parts. The recent move forward
with the new Tylersburg C7X58 into the
multimedia market, is this a strategic
gamble? As we know there are many well
established household names already
dominating this market, how do you see
the success of this multimedia
mainboard. Does this mean also that you
as a company will be pursuing the
overclockers who have the time and the
money to manipulate from this technology
and will we be seeing more of this type
of mainboard from Supermicro?
Yes, before we always focused on the
server and storage, especially the
server. Gradually we have taken on more
and more workstations and even some
gaming machines. Like I mentioned
earlier, the GPU optimised systems are
really good for our high-end
workstation, graphic simulation
customers. Even some high end gaming
solutions where we start to support some
customers in the industry.
There are a few high end studios that
are looking for the products that you
are currently looking for to provide.
One studio called and asks what we had
thought of the product, to which we
replied we have reviewed and ran the
mainboard and it worked exceedingly
well. We were very surprised to see this
sort of product coming out from
Supermicro. An over clockable mainboard
from Supermicro, this was never heard of
before; this was hello this is something
new to the market. Do you see this as
something else coming online for the
future or do you think it will be just a
one of scenario?
We saw lots of demand some time ago and
I believe we are open minded to
emphasize some products in this area.
And to truly optimise it for over
clocking and we have a plan to do
something like this in the near future.
A sort of Super De Duper Machine
Yes really optimised for performance
pushing capabilities. But we had those
capabilities a long time ago. It was
really more a strategic time of
allocating our resources. Currently
though the GPU is our main focus for the
workstation and writing applications and
very soon we should have a gaming
over-clocking emphasised product.
What sort of niche products do the
company have that sets itself above from
the other mainboard makers.
Like I previously mentioned, our strong
server products: Our 2, 2Twin Squared
product provides a base for performance
per watt, performance per dollar and
performance per square feet. In our
graphics workstations our 4 GPU support
motherboard will deliver these brand new
innovations in the market and will for
sure benefit the customer. There is
point which I would like to make that
there are very few companies like
Supermicro who have all the engineers
under the one campus facility to make
sure everything works together and
that’s a big difference. This you won't
see within the Tier 1 companies. They
do not have this luxury. A motherboard,
chassis, storage controller and graphic
cards - all the engineers are talking to
one other from within the one campus.
Supermicro considers itself a total
solutions provider, not just a mainboard
maker.
Looking briefly into market share of
your products, you feature very heavily
Intel based platforms and a good few AMD
solutions. What has been the company’s
primary objective in pushing forward
both platforms into a market that relies
heavily upon informed choice and PR
driven products?
Our decision is based upon the market
and customer demand. We therefore have
two strong product lines from Intel and
AMD and we try to utilise the technology
we develop for each of those partner
product lines.
We are about to see the new ratified
standards of SAS2 and the next
generation of SATA 6GB/s. Will the
company be ready to incorporate these
new standards on the mainboards of
workstations and servers rapidly?
Absolutely. We have SAS2 servers, SAS2
storage, for workstation all available
right now.
I take it then this is for us today and
for the readership tomorrow.
We can disclose this little bit to the
market today to let them know of our
pending capabilities for the forth
coming advent. Some time very soon we
will have the official launch. But we
are now ready to show something.
Deviating ever so slightly from the main
topic of today. As a manufacturing
company that produces without doubt some
of the best workstations (okay will
rephrase that - the best workstations),
servers and add-on peripherals in the
world. With all this expertise to hand
and the availability of parts readily
off the shelf, have you as a company not
thought of making a fast dollar with the
vogue SSD's. Or are Supermicro a
traditionalist that sticks with standard
hard discs.
Ah Ha, okay SSD's we work very closely
with our partners. Therefore we have
started to ship SSD's products in our
systems about 12months ago. Now the
quality has grown considerably and very
stable so I would like to say that we
are one of the early birds who shipped
SSD technology in our systems for
applications especially in our server
products.
So why not make your own SSD's.
You know we as a company do have some
limited resources in certain areas,
every company has limited resources.
So is the actual system architecture for
the servers the workstations and the
graphic application systems. Therefore
we like to completely focus on the areas
that we are really good. SSD is a
marvellous technology and that’s why we
have selected a partner to closely work
with. We have the expertise and one
day maybe make our own specialised SSD,
however we do have to watch our R & D
budget. However we do have some
limited resources at some point soon for
SSD's to improve the performance and
lower the cost.
The company make many interesting
add-ons for servers and your workstation
components, how much of a timeframe and
investment with R & D goes into these
components such as CPU heatsinks and
PSU's. We have to bare in mind that you
have reached the Gold Standard on the
80+ standards. That is a magnificent
achievement by any standards as there
are not many PSU's out there that has
this recognition.
It basically started 3 years ago where
we were one of the first companies to
push forward the high efficiency Power
Supplies working very closely with our
suppliers. All our other supplies
stating - "Oh its too early not many
people are asking for these high
efficiency PSU's. No one is pushing
for these high efficiency PSU's as
aggressively for you. So wait and maybe
you will see 18 months later a high
efficiency PSU's ready for you. “ I sat
down with our engineers and marketing
guys and said "well high efficiency
PSU's is the strategy we should be ready
to go with". Back then no-one wanted to
manufacture these PSU's for the
industry. Therefore this is why we
started to hire our engineers to study
it and how to improve and make a high
efficiency PSU's. After a few months
when we started to call our close to
partners and we said "hey we have the
idea on how to achieve this, how about
we sit around the table and work
together" . We can design some
circuitry to work with you. From there
we started to work with our new high
efficiency PSU. Very soon we had an 80+
and now a 90% energy efficient PSU and
18 months ago we actually had a 93%
efficient PSU and that was noted as the
highest efficient PSU in the world.
After that our power supply team
continued to grow. Therefore today we
have about 30 PSU engineers of huge
expertise within our group. This team
has been a very sharp engineering team
and are now starting to develop the next
generation power supplies for our
servers and workstations. <Laughs> Ha
before I tried very hard just not to
make a Supermicro just a power supply
technology company. But because our
partners like to focus on power supply
technology back 3 years ago that’s when
we started to make our power supply
technology company - Ops team. They
show great potential to grow in the
future.
The current green issue is a fore to
many minds how do you as a company
approach and support this very complex
problem as some would see it.
Green server support, you emphasize this
strongly on the Supermicro Website for
lower rack power & acoustics and will
either Intel or AMD have advantages in
this area .
As a technology company especially its
servers and workstations, we now have
improved power supply efficiency,
systems server architecture. High
efficiency heatsinks, high efficiency
board technology components is easier
for us to contribute something to the
earth. And we have only one earth. We
feel very enthusiastic to help improve
the green concept to the world. So as
the chairman of CSCI, Asia Pacific and
other territories we have encouraged
other companies to go for green as
aggressive as possible. As I described
earlier we have those 30 engineers
focusing on the high efficiency power
supplies. And too, our high
efficiency motherboards with the high
systems efficiency architecture already
strongly exist in these items. We
will only continue to grow and improve
upon these areas. All our engineers
and sales teams enjoy the feeling of
helping the earth to be more healthy
through our technology commitments. So
I have to say that most of our people
are very proud and continue with lots of
energy to continue to work hard and
gives them a good feeling. |
