We Keep IT Green™

Continued Meetings and the Factory Tour

After a brief lunch, we then met the Ivan Tay, Senior Director of Product Management and Technical Service.  Well this was a blast from the past.  Some 10 years ago, support was all too often found within the news group forums much like many sites now that have their own forums.  A wealth of knowledge and tips can be there.  But, as we said back then the newsgroups were the focus of attention and if you had a problem this was where you would get your answer.   Ivan like Robert Paris (yes he is still there of those of you who will remember) prowled the Supermicro group passing on those needed tips and answering questions when possible.  Today this has all changed and they have a very good Q & A section on the Supermicro website that is updated monthly with all their findings.   Ivan going into great depths on how they proceed on a weekly and monthly basis to update it all.  Once more we met the same overwhelming enthusiasm for the company and it's products.

Supermicro is known for its superb support in many areas and when a problem occurs, the support team moves rapidly into gear to fix the replicated issue.  Great lengths are undergone to pro-actively resolve these unforeseen problems that sometimes can happen.   Around the clock work is undertaken to resolve the issue then due notification is sent out advising distributors and current customers who could experience the problem found with its complete workaround.  We have seen this in action and it is pretty amazing when a team of Supermicro engineers arrive on the spot to fix something.  Supermicro has a very high quality standard of technical support expertise.   Downtime is something none of us can afford; time is money to the end-users and to Supermicro with engineers in the field.   Fortunately, this is a very rare occurrence as the quality control protocol for all parts is extremely rigid.

The next stage of our tour was that of one of the company's actual manufacturing facilities.   Yes and contrary to belief all the pre-order systems are built on-site meticulously. But before we head into the tour we need to highlight just how big Supermicro's campus actually is.

From the map below we see just how big the organisation actually is.  On a side note another large building belonging to the company is approximately 20 miles north.

What can be seen above shows just how huge the Supermicro organisation really is, as these buildings are massive.

The tour of one of the manufacturing facilities was as you can imagine was completely off limits to any form of photography and understandable so a point to be covered later.  The manager of this sector greeted us immediately and once more the pride for his sector shone through.  The assembly and build quality of the servers and workstations was meticulous with each part (even down to that last screw mounting the mainboard) making up the system being completely accounted for.  Therefore any defect found with any batch unit could be traced back immediately throughout their stringent quality control protocols that are in place.   Here we witnessed a few specialised builds for some companies only requiring 20 or 30 systems right the way down to one company which had over 150 servers under test.


This is where it got very interesting.  For example.

Company A can provide Supermicro with its own image and Supermicro will install and bed in the system for the required time which Company A specifies, anywhere from 24 - 72 hours depending on mission critical the system is.  Once complete; Company A can either come in and pick up (or have delivered) its completed order ready to immediately install the units at their required location.

Company B however can securely and remotely login into their rack of units, push and install their required image and remotely monitor the units whilst completing their burn in period and therefore maintain its own secure images.  If a part failure occurs then it can be instantly replaced by Supermicro's staff and the burn in process can be completed, meeting that all important deadline.  Once complete the whole rack of systems can then be packaged up and onward shipped to Company B's required location.  Therefore we see complete security for Company B.  This in turn saves Company B on cost and manpower, quite an ingenious idea.

Finally down to Company C, this is just for the specialised operator that requires only a few systems built at the time.  Within this sector we saw a dedicated small team building some powerful customised units costing thousands of dollars.   The same painstaking commitment went into these units as could be seen for the specialised servers.  Within this small sector Company C examples are turned around very quickly indeed.  The same dedicated detailed attention is delivered to even the most smallest of orders to meet Company C's tight deadlines.

There are many positive rumours and whispers floating about how Supermicro supplies Tier 1 providers with complete total solutions.   Is this true; then take it from us -  yes from what we witnessed.   Therefore earlier when we stated that no photography was to be allowed you now must understood fully why.

Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - Interview
Page 3 - Interview (Continued)
Page 4 - Interview (Continued)
Page 5 - Interview (Continued)
Page 6 - Continued Meetings and the Factory Tour
Page 7 - Conclusions