Lenovo now offers and supports the former BladeCenter blade servers and products, since acquiring the product line from IBM. The product line is now offered as the Lenovo Flex System series of blade servers.
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Supermicro SuperBlade
Score 7.0 out of 10
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SuperBlade is a high density x86 Multi-Node Server for Enterprise Cloud, HPC Applications, from Supermicro. They are available in 8U, 6U and 4U enclosures with hot-swap NVMe support, with air or direct liquid cooling.
Smaller environments may not get the benefit of a BladeCenter. If you only have a few servers, it would be cost effective to just purchase individual servers. If you need to share a SANS, need high-level uptime and redundancy, or just have a need for lots of servers, then a BladeCenter would be beneficial.
Supermicro may be well suited if what you will be deploying on the servers is supported, because if you don't, you may have no support at all. In our case, we have had some hardware problems where the support is not efficient compared to other experiences we had (HP, DELL). On the other hand, their servers price is quite good, so it's a win win if you are looking for better prices than other vendors.
They are reliable, safe and very profitable equipment, their operation is easy, they provide high availability as all their components are redundant and thus the continuity of the operation can be guaranteed wherever they are installed, in addition to having the option of gradual growth, you can start with a single node and grow until the chassis is full.
My experience with the support was not that good, it always takes a lot of time to get somewhere when raising a support case. I gave it a 6 because I think they have room for improvement here, It could be good if they would act quicker and send in replacements for faulty hardware.
I find that IBM/Lenovo servers are more robustly constructed and provide more comprehensive online technical specifications, which are useful for troubleshooting and budgeting purposes. Their gear is strong, solid, and trustworthy. Hardware problems are extremely rare for us. IBM/customer Lenovo's service is top-notch; it's always quick to respond and really helpful. Support doesn't have you answer a lot of questions before helping you. Since they recognize you as a server administrator with some amount of expertise, they can converse with you at that level.
The supermicro superblade servers are performing really well on our infrastructure, we are running a broad set of applications: voip, JAVA, linux, windows, hypervisors, etc. They are easy to install and configure and the price is a winning situation. On the other hand, The support is not so good, HP and DELL are stronger in this point. If you get any failures on your systems, they will replace them immediately, but supermicro will ask for a lot of information on the case before handing out replacement hardware, which makes it slow.
