The Supermicro AS-1024US-TRT is profound in that it is designed for a very competitive market. This dual-socket server is designed in Supermicro’s “Ultra” design language. Practically, that means that the layout and many of the features and design choices largely mirror those found on the company’s Ice Lake Xeon X12 servers. The first part of the competition is then the competition for this AMD EPYC 7003 / 7002 platform versus the Intel Xeon offerings. The second area of competition for this class of servers is that it is designed to compete with the Dell EMC PowerEdge, HPE ProLiant, and Lenovo ThinkSystems. Supermicro has other server lines offering heavy cost optimization, GPU/ storage, or simply density. This particular server is designed to compete head-to-head in the high-end and high-volume 1U server market.
Supermicro AS-1024US-TRT Hardware Overview
Supermicro AS-1024US-TRT External Overview
The outside of the server is defined by two major features. First, is simply the depth. This is a 29″ deep server, which is shallow enough to fit in the vast majority of 4-post data center racks. Some newer servers are deep enough where they will face interference with lower-cost colocation racks with zero U PDUs, but Supermicro has a very flexible solution here. The other major feature is simply the drive bay layout.
Drive bays are four 3.5″ bays, but something may look different with our test system. The 3.5″ bays can utilize SATA (mostly for 3.5″ hard drives), SAS3 (using an additional SAS3 RAID controller/ HBA), or NVMe. Our system is set up for NVMe so we have the traditional orange tabs on the drive trays. Since most NVMe SSDs are 2.5″, that means that this is not the densest 2.5″ configuration available. Here is a quick shot of the backplane driving this flexibility with a Kioxia CD6 NVMe SSD installed.
The reason we have a 4x 3.5″ configuration is simply flexibility. Many server buyers want to have the option for NVMe and hard drives in the same 1U chassis, something that is not practical with a dense 2.5″ configuration. We do wish that Supermicro had an option for 7mm SSDs or E1.S SSDs in this chassis, but Supermicro has a number of SKUs that define what the front panel layout is. This is a 4x 3.5″ chassis, but Supermicro has dense 2.5″ SKUs as well.
The rear of the chassis has a fairly standard layout. The primary I/O is handled by two USB 3.0 ports. There is also a serial port and a VGA port on the rear of the system. The serial and VGA ports may seem ancient by modern standards, but that is what many KVM carts in data centers are designed to service. There is also a bright green outlined network port. At STH, we use green network cables in the data centers for management, but not quite this bright of green/ yellow color.
One can see the networking is provided by two RJ45 ports. These RJ45 10Gbase-T ports are serviced via an Intel X710-at2 NIC that one can find on the proprietary 1U riser. We will discuss the rest of the riser in our internal overview, but the advantage of this setup is that it allows the same motherboard and chassis to be used with different networking options. Since the riser has both the NIC and additional PCIe connectivity, it effectively does not use a slot. Supermicro has different options here as well, but we have the dual 10Gbase-T unit.
In terms of power, the unit features redundant 1kW power supplies. These are 80Plus Titanium solutions. Many of the servers we review in this class still have 80Plus Platinum power supplies. These cost a bit more but the increased efficiency can lower the power consumption of servers by a few percent freeing up power budget elsewhere.
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