[talk] Supermicro source?

[Charles Sprickman]

Hi all,

I’m looking for a Supermicro vendor that’s somewhere between the “shopping at 3 different stores to find chassis, RAM, drives, etc.” and full white-labelled servers.  Like I pick a chassis/motherboard and the vendor deals with finding compatible RAM and any oddball stuff like the drive backplane for some small premium/markup.  The last guy I knew that did this has been out of the business for at least 5 years (GCS).

Failing that, after some really bad experiences with overblown IBM/Lenovo garbage, if I go with a server vendor, Dell feels like the least insane choice.  Lenovo is really only for folks who are thrilled with long-term support contracts where “fixing” things is basically swapping out hardware until it works.  Also screw IBM and their EFI that takes 15 minutes to boot. The HP server I have at home is a bit too proprietary.  The few Dells I’ve dealt with seem to have a fairly minimal amount of bells and whistles and have been in service for ages.  Any thoughts on their current lineup?

Thanks,

Charles