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Today we would like to offer you an exclusive interview with Charles Liang, President and CEO of Supermicro Company, a well-known manufacturer of server solutions in the today’s market. Find out more about the history of the company, the keys to successful business and the upcoming exciting products from the CEO and founder of Supermicro.

X-bit labs: Thank you very much for agreeing to meet with us today and to share some of the insider info on Supermicro, its business model, and plans for the future. I would like to start with the history of Supermicro Company, how it was founded. Does your company have any Chinese roots? How was it developing during the past years?

Charles Liang: First of all I would like to say that I appreciate your visiting us and it’s a pleasure for me to interview with you.

Supermicro was founded in 1993, so our company is now a little over 10 years old. Back then the PC industry was quite saturated and one needed to have very special technology to break through. Any company that wanted to survive in the hardware industry had to manufacture offshore. But I believed that high quality products delivered in an earlier timeframe could help us get there. Indeed, to date our growth rate varies between 30 to 150% each year without any exception.

X-bit labs: What market do you consider to be the biggest for Supermicro right now?

Charles Liang: High-end server solutions for the enterprise market, with a wide variety of applications. Our vertical markets currently include high performance computing for research labs, education, and government, as well as applications in security and medical spaces.

X-bit labs: Why did Supermicro decide to go to the server market? What determined the decision to focus on this type of computer products?

Charles Liang: I wanted to use my engineering background, where I felt like I could contribute more, especially in designing quality servers. I found that working with servers required me to care more about quality, performance and features. That’s why my company focuses on designing and building superior quality servers. This trend will continue for sure.

X-bit labs: If you look at many companies out there, they try to expand their product lines. After being successful in a certain field for a while, they then try to apply their experience and knowledge to win some of the market in the close-by fields as well as in completely different market segments. What about Supermicro?

Charles Liang: Everyday we discover new challenges and exciting opportunity in this space. Today we ship only about 45K server units per month, and we envision growing that number to about 150K units per month within the next few years. We’re also focusing on lowering customer TCO and expanding our product lines. Perhaps one day you might see a Supermicro notebook, or a Supermicro TV, there is that possibility of course! :)

X-bit labs: Is there a certain limit, a certain bar you decided you should reach before you expand your product line into completely new fields, such as mobile solutions, for instance?

Charles Liang: Well, besides growing our market share and enhancing our ability to offer excellent products and service to customers, we want to continue offering a wide array of selections featuring better quality and competitive pricing. That’s our vision for the next few years.

X-bit labs: How would you evaluate the Supermicro’s position in the market today? How would you compare your progress to what the other server manufacturers have to offer at this time?

Charles Liang: Overall we are enjoying a big percentage of market shares and exercising quite an influence on the industry. Speaking in terms of our sales volumes, I could say that compared with tier one companies, we are still smaller in scale, in the server product line. But we are a much faster growing company. Looking at the current growth rate we are experiencing right now in term of volume, I anticipate we’ll turn into one of the top key players in the market within the next few years.

X-bit labs: What do you think of the more consumer server solutions such as servers for digital home? Intel has been promoting the digital home concept for the past years very actively. The amount of valuable multimedia content within a digital home environment keeps growing. Are you going to offer any solutions targeted specifically for this application field which could provide reliable and secure storage of this data and easy access to it?

Charles Liang: We have a couple of engineers studying this area, but it is not our main focus. At this moment, our main focus at Supermicro is offering a wide array of high quality server building block solutions with a rich feature set.

X-bit labs: Supermicro is a server company, however, you do offer a few desktop mainboards.

Charles Liang: About 90% of the current company products are server solutions. However, we intend to give our customers a broader choice, so we do offer a few desktop solutions to please our customers.

X-bit labs: The reason I asked, is because some users would like to bring the excellent networking features and connectivity offered by Supermicro server products into the workstation or high-end desktop environment. We have recently reviewed Supermicro PDSGE mainboard, which is exactly a product like that.

Charles Liang: Yes, we’re in fact quite proud of our motherboard products. Since our entire product lines are doing very well, we need to ramp up our production capacities. In this regard, we’ve recently bought another new building in Silicon Valley to keep up with demand.

X-bit labs: I believe we all have noticed a while ago that the current pace at which the hardware and software develop is simply amazing. Workstations and small servers are picking up really quickly these days. High-end hardware components and advanced professional software applications have significantly increased the computational power of this type of systems. Today in a small office environment or on a home workstation platform you can do a lot of things, which back in the days could only be done on a number of monster machines working simultaneously with a lot of specialists required to operate and manipulate them. Now if you need to perform some complex scientific calculations or complete some professional video editing tasks, you can put together a powerful system on your own.

Charles Liang: Yes, that’s true. This is a fast growing market and we will expand in this direction as well. The mainboard you just mentioned, PDSGE, is a truly optimized motherboard in this market.

X-bit labs: Speaking about this mainboard, you do not offer any solutions for computer enthusiasts but you still provided your PDSGE with overclocking-friendly features. Why? Who is this product targeted for?

Charles Liang: With this mainboard we did not promote overclocking, although the feature was there. Overclocking was not our main focus on this motherboard. Since it’s a workstation solution, we opted instead to focus on overall system stability, quality and reliability.

X-bit labs: Then the question is, if you do not want to promote overclocking and to encourage people to overclock, then why you would take the time and trouble, invest resources into the development of the overclocking options? If the board had no tools for overclocking, people wouldn’t question that: they would accept it as Supermicro doesn’t do overclocking-friendly products. But once you got into the overclocking environment, you provided the software, and you offered a bit of an opportunity, you will feel like the users aren’t happy with that: they want more.

Charles Liang: Well, I have to admit that we do have the capability to provide a reliable overclocking system, but again it is not our focus. Maybe you could call these features a “hidden bonus” for gaming enthusiasts; you get it free of charge. :)

X-bit labs: It is a known fact that Supermicro is working closely with Intel. However, there are still some platforms designed for AMD solutions. Could you say a few words about products for AMD Opteron platform?

Charles Liang: We make Opteron solutions available to customers who request them. We recently started to sell some AMD solutions to the channel. Right now we have quite a few very good solutions in the market and have made the information available on our website APLUS pages.

X-bit labs: Aren’t you afraid that you are moving at a too slow pace, that you might be too late for the market and that your competitors may take over a big share of AMD platforms market by then?

Charles Liang: A good product is never late for the market. We have a solid customer base for Opteron platforms and it will be interesting to see how the demand grows.

X-bit labs: You have probably heard that AMD is suing Intel for unfair competition. Is Intel’s pressure one of the reasons Supermicro doesn’t offer that many AMD solutions?

Charles Liang: Well, we prefer to remain neutral. We are good friends with all the companies, Intel, AMD and others. We have been working closely with Intel for a long time and they trust us as a partner and vice-versa.

X-bit labs: Ok, I won’t ask any other tricky questions about the Intel-AMD relations. Supermicro is currently offering solutions mostly for Intel platforms. In this respect, could you please say a few words about solutions for Intel Itanium?

Charles Liang: Intel Itanium is a very special architecture. Some customers like it a lot, so we do have solutions for Intel Itanium, but they are not our major focus. There is some demand for Itanium these days, but it is geared for specific customers. Itanium platforms are primarily used for scientific applications and huge databases. Again, our primary focus is DP Xeon platforms which make about 90% of all the platforms we currently ship. In the future, we will certainly concentrate on multi-core solutions.

X-bit labs: Which solution is Supermicro’s current best selling product?

Charles Liang: Right now our best selling solution is a DP 1U Xeon server platform. We provide a very broad range of products for customers to choose from. Today we offer more than 200 server motherboards and about 350 server chassis models.

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.

Supermicro: Company Focuses on Designing and Building Superior Quality Servers