Supermicro is definitely a "you get what you pay for". We bought thousands of servers from their vertical integrations partners, had massive board and backplane problems. Took a few years but they eventually took back over $30 million dollars worth of servers, which were scrapped ultimately because the rework on them was so cost prohibitive. We lost $30M on that even after the $30M in good will refunds.
Supermicro also has the lowest bios/efi/bmc/ipmi/redfish out of any vendor we have seen.
Just low tier cheap ass shit by a company who can barely survive quarter to quarter without running some new scam on customers, investors, and even governments.
Pretty much the same experience (on a much smaller scale). And just open up one of their servers and compare the engineering to a Dell or HPE server. Anything that can be cheaped out is. Corrugated plastic for cooling air channels, FRU assemblies held in place with sheet metal screws, all very bargin basement.
I haven't worked with anything at that scale, but the little bit that I was SuperMicro adjacent I was always unimpressed by the "fit and finish" of the entire experience, as compared to Dell and HP. (Having said that, the entire x86 commodity server experience is shitty anyway. I had a brief time, early in my career, when I did work with DEC Alpha machines. Man, they had their shit together. Stuff was expensive as sin, but stuff worked together and worked well. Build quality was tank-like.)
When Compaq servers were still a thing it was the same with those. You could drop them two stories and they'd probably continue playing if the cable was long enough ;)
Oh and you'd get fined for damage to the pavement.
Pretty much. But at one point you could buy 2 to 3 units to every equivalent Dell or HP unit unless you had enough scale to get volume discounts. At $30M I expect the price to be a lot closer though.
Then it’s a matter of how well your engineering/ops org is setup to deal with silly hardware issues and annoyances. Some orgs will burn dozens of hours on a random failure, some will burn an hour or treat the entire server as disposable due to aforementioned cost differences. If you are not built to run on cheaply engineered gear that has lots of “quality of life” sharp edges (including actual physical sharp edges!) then you are gonna have a bad time. Silly things like rack rails sucking will bite you and run up the costs far more than anyone would expect unless you have experience to predict and plan for such things beforehand.
Of course you do have the risk of a totally shit batch or model of server where all that goes out the window. I got particularly burned by some of their high density blade servers, where it was a similar story to yours. Total loss in the 7 figures on that one!
Totally agreed on their BMC/firmware department. Flashbacks to hours of calls with them trying to explain the basics. My favorite story from that group is arguing with them over what a UUID is - they thought it was just a randomly generated string. Worked until one didn’t pass parsing on some obscure deeply buried library and caused mysterious automation failures due to being keyed against chassis UUID… and that’s when they’d actually burn one into firmware in the first place.
It was also always a tradeoff of having to deal with cheaped out hardware engineering with supermicro or with some horrible enterprise quarterly numbers driven sales process with Dell.
I've ordered from Dell and Supermicro (and others, but not in volume or often enough to have much data) for a couple decades now.
Supermicro you consistently get a good/best price. It's already pretty low, so going from a 10 unit order to 1,000 unit order gives you some discount but nothing crazy most of the time.
Dell it's basically based on phase of the moon. I typically tried to time my smaller purchases to coincide with end of quarter. Wait for my rep to call me and ask if I had anything for him. If my little 6 unit order helped them or their boss hit whatever target you could get amazing deals. Stuff where they wouldn't budge 2 months earlier could be had at below supermicro pricing. More than a few times they would give such ridiculous pricing that I considered ordering way more than I needed to part out the components on eBay and just recycle the sheet metal and motherboard.
Other times/years (and different reps too!) would give a budgetary quote for a build and say they'd match a Supermicro quote which was nice, but took extra work and never feels great when you know you're using a vendor just to get pricing down with the one you actually want to go with.
I just hate dealing with that junk, so I tended to prefer Supermicro to reliably get decent pricing when I needed the gear vs. having a whole strategy around order timing.
Then you get into stuff like hard drives/SSD and that was a whole thing w/ Dell for quite some time. These days they are competitive but they were not always.
I wouldn't if I were you. Indeed there's a membrane that can keep drops away from electronics, but one big drop will find a way eventually. Doesn't even have to be a spill. Macs are infinitely fragile actually, there is zero effort spent on moisture or even dust intrusion.
Bankman-Fried is doing 25 years in prison. That's the average prison sentence for murder. The message being sent is that you should turn on your partners in crime now and save yourself a lot of suffering in the long run.
This is a shame. Coworker got a Lightning and he loves it. He doesn't tow with it but he does field work for fiber optic stuff, usually back home every day. Runs his computers, tools, ventilation for going down manholes, he even powered a sump pump from it, without needing to haul a generator.
The hybrid truck can now do the same, but it's a really nice truck
The lightning and power boost can do up to 50amps though, the old trucks had to be running and you had to have a second or hight output alternator added.
Having the battery/hybrid with their nice inverters was nice
Donated! Thank you very much, NetBSD was one of my first experiences, on a Pentium 60 with a 504MB hard drive. It made me who I am today, eternally grateful to have learned from such amazing and talented people.
I'm so glad you say that. Resi aerial is perfect in most locations. No dig, no service boxes in front yards, under someone's unpermitted driveway pour, ample power easily, a guy in a bucket truck is all you need.
Trenchless works well when it can, but even reasonable infrastructure underground is twice as expensive.
I love seeing a neighborhood lit up in fiber in 2-5 days and subscribers online at 1-10Gb in soooo many places. Keeps crews busy either way :D
Downside is: a drunk guy in a truck is all you need to tear it down, not to mention natural disaster influence. And it's unsightly AF.
Yes, it's fast and cheap. That's how we got the situation that a backwater village in the midst of the "anus mundi" of Romania has XGPON for a few dozen euros a month, while you're lucky to get anything above 50M VDSL in Germany outside of large urban areas and 200M VDSL in urban areas.
But holy hell it's an eyesore to be in said village in Romania, look out the window and look at a bunch of fiber strung not even from a proper pole but from a tree. Takes the German expression "Kabelbaum" to a whole new level.
Even if a pole is taken out by a drunk driver that does not mean the cables are going to be severed. I've seen plenty of times when poles had to be replaced, but the communications cables remained undamaged in place due to the strength and tension of the supporting strand.
The bigger issue over the last 5 years in the area where my company operates is the number of dump trucks that leave the bed up. Given the weight of dump truck it is easy for them to pull down multiple poles when they catch the cables, although perhaps they are drunk drivers...
And outdoor DSLAMs are invulnerable, to cars, vandalism, dog-piss, whatever? Ever walked by one in the middle of the night, when its cooling fans hum? Wanna live near that?
Yes. But you've written about ugly and vulnerable infrastructure am "Arsch der Welt"/"JWD" first, and lamented about limited availability and performance of pink Telecomicstan VDSL in Teutonistan second. I've written about the latter, since I've heard them, because they are not passive.
Lots of words to say "use already available time libraries and use ISO time formatting". Cool story bruh. And really really terrible way to communicate one of the most beaten to death categories with that site design
Most time libraries - especially the stdlib ones - are broken in various subtle ways. ISO time formatting is neat, but only works for past events.
Your approach is usually going to be sufficient-ish for timestamping past events - which is most applications. But try to build a calendar, and you'll quickly notice that it simply doesn't work that way.
Not the person you asked but what (s)he described sounds like "One nation under black mail" by Whitney Web. Actually worried whether the author would get Epsteined herself.
Not the previous commenter, but I would recommend Hiding In Plain Sight, by Sarah Kendzior. It centers on Donald Trump, but covers in great detail what is publicly known about the seedy history of the people in his orbit, including Epstein, and it calls into question how the people in power in the political, business, and media worlds have left so many questions go unanswered.
I've been out of rails for more than a decade, ended up mostly with Django, but I always kinda miss rails. But Django has treated me so well, just wish async and python in general had more legs on this side
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