X-bit labs: I am sure Supermicro has something new and exciting up the sleeve for the next, say, 6 months. I would greatly appreciate if you could share with X-bit readers some news about your upcoming products, their features, their anticipated release schedule and their major advantages over the competitors and predecessors.

Charles Liang: We’re excited about SAS - Serial Attached SCSI – which is the latest development in the storage field. SAS will provide better scalability: you can install 128 hard drives with one single controller, compared with SCSI when you could have about 30 HDDs maximum with two channels. SAS will offer better performance, of course: 3Gbit/s per channel for 8 channels in the controller card for instance, means you have almost 3GB/s, which is more than three times the output the SCSI can provide.

Besides, SAS fully supports SATA, a much cheaper HD, as well. So, thanks to better scalability, better performance and better price, I believe SAS will become popular very soon. And today Supermicro already has about 10 server storage solutions with SAS support. I believe we are the number one SAS promoter in the market today. We have multiple Paxville platforms with SAS support (DP dual-core Xeon solutions) available today. And we will continue developing more servers with SAS support. In the next 6 months, we will have at least 20 dual-CPU server models supporting SAS, including 3.5” and 2.5” SAS hard drives. Thanks to the compatibility with SATA, the customers will be able to use SATA drives in these servers to lower system costs.

In Q1 2006, we are looking forward to officially introducing our blade server to the market. That’s another very unique machine: 7U chassis with the support for 10 Quad server blades within a chassis. With this platform we will provide 7,000W and 4,500W of power supply options.

In terms of communication capabilities, we are able to support 10x 2-Gigabit Infiniband, 10Gigabit Ethernet, as well as PCI Express x8 features. Blade servers offer ease of installation and maintenance, cable-less, space saving as well as power saving advantages. Unlike the competitors who offer blade servers only for middle-power or low-power CPUs, our blade servers will support any CPU thus reducing the end user’s cost and offering our customers more choices. Additionally, most of our competitors offer only up to 400 CFM airflow for cooling, while we offer almost twice as much.

So, summing up: our blade servers will offer much more electric power, more airflow, higher computing power and density, higher communication bandwidth, more choice of LAN solutions, and better features, at lower costs - that is going to be an awesome product due Q1 next year. We’re looking forward to launching this product line.

X-bit labs: Thank you very much for your time. It was pleasure talking to you. On behalf of X-bit labs team and readers I would like to wish Supermicro good luck in conquering the market and we look forward to seeing more exciting new solutions from you in the future.