Supermicro vs Lenovo vs…

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omar

New Member
Apr 10, 2021
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www.rememberthemilk.com
Hi there,

Long time lurker, first time poster. Big fan of STH. :)

So… we’re looking to replace our Supermicro SYS-1029U-TRT systems with some new Milan 74F3 based systems.

I’ve had a bunch of quotes out and, weirdly, Lenovo SR645/665 systems are pricing below what Supermicro are offering on the AS-1124US-TNRP.

I did want some sort of on-site service because these are mission critical systems. The Lenovo have 2H response times and the SM have 4H.

So I guess my question is… does anyone have experience with Lenovo service? Supermicro on-site service?

The ThinkSystems have a nicer build quality than the SM. OTOH, in 3+ years on the 1029’s we’ve only had one PSU fail.

The only downside to the Lenovo that I can see is that you can’t just bring your own NVMe drives because they, for whatever reason, decided to sell their OEM drives with the hot swap tray attached to the drives.

Which kind of pisses me off enough to consider paying more for SM.

Or maybe someone knows a SM partner who can magic up better quotes, in which case, please let me know.

(Just randomly, Dell is pricing out at 2x Lenovo/SM, which makes me wonder if I’m missing some magic Dell cheat code…)
 

NablaSquaredG

Layer 1 Magician
Aug 17, 2020
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One thing to keep in mind if you care about the resale value:

Resale value of Lenovo EPYC compared to its acquisition costs is probably lower, because Lenovo vendor-locks EPYC CPUs. That means you can neither part out the Lenovo servers in case of a CPU upgrade and just resell the EPYC CPUs, because they will only ever work in Lenovo servers, nor are servers that vendor-lock CPUs popular on the second hand market.


Another thing I really like about Supermicro is their building-blocks or carry-over parts strategy. I've had customers that were able to temporarily fix a machine (until the field technician arrived) using equal parts from some other decommissioned servers from the warehouse that were waiting to get scrapped
 

omar

New Member
Apr 10, 2021
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www.rememberthemilk.com
@NablaSquaredG thanks for your response.

Resale value isn't a concern in this case. I'm aware that Lenovo locks them (thanks to the STH article :) but at the same time they're significantly cheaper from Lenovo than Supermicro for the higher end parts (roughly 80% on the 75F3).

I do like the Supermicro's because they're more enthusiast friendly (and the NVMe bays aren't, for a lack of a better word, locked to very overpriced drives), but for whatever reason Lenovo is giving a lot more value for less money in this case. And we're sort of price sensitive.

I may have got some inflated Supermicro quotes though. I've asked a couple more resellers to quote it so we'll see.

Also got in touch with Dell for the R7525/R6525 to see if they'll match the Lenovo/SM pricing. I'm not sure if they suffer from the same NVMe tray issue, though. And their service upgrades (same day instead of next day) are like $7k per server list price vs Lenovo/SM at $1200, but maybe that's just to get people to contact the sales team. :)