A shout-out to SuperMicro
I’ve been a computer enthusiast since 1991 and a systems administrator since 2001. In that time, I’ve had the opportunity to work/play with a wide variety of hardware and software, which has inevitably led to the formation of opinions about various vendors. There are the good (e.g. Seagate, Crucial/Micron, 3ware, Asus, Texas Instruments, Cisco), the bad (e.g. Dell, D-Link, IBM, Gateway), and the downright ugly (e.g. Microsoft, Real, SCO).
Recently, I’ve discovered a vendor of servers and server-class components that definitely belongs in the first list: SuperMicro. The name is a little dorky, but I’ve been impressed with the quality of their stuff.
At work, we have four servers using SuperMicro parts:
| Hostname | Chassis | Motherboard |
|---|---|---|
| fortress | SC833T-R760 | H8DAE |
| universe | SC833T-R760 | X7DBE |
| archive | SC833T-550 | Other |
| quasar | SC743T-645 | Other |
I personally plan on buying an SC733T chassis and a PDSLA motherboard in the near future. I’ve been meaning to build a RAID-5 media & backup server for a while now… 
If you can’t or don’t want to home-build, check out Silicon Mechanics, a Seattle-based integrator of SuperMicro products. They built-and-burned the first two machines in that table. We’ve been quite pleased with them as well.
I have no stake in, nor affiliation with, either company. I’m just a satisfied customer, and since the computer industry is teeming with crappy products from crappy vendors, I wanted to take a second to recognize some exceptions.