Supermicro Hyper SuperServer 121H-TNR Review

The Supermicro Hyper SuperServer 121H-TNR (SHOP NOW) is a 1U platform with dual-socket support for 4^th or 5^th generation Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs with up to 64 cores each. At full capacity it can support up to 8TB of memory. It can also be configured with 12x storage bays compatible with NVMe, SAS and SATA drive types. 

Supermicro’s Hyper SuperServer line supports 4th and 5^th generation CPUs for maximum performance and a high degree of flexibility. They are optimized for AI inference and Machine learning, network functions, and virtualization, plus cloud computing, and use as an enterprise server. This particular unit only comes as a completely assembled system so there is no 1x or 2x CPUs. You get 2x, plus a few other items to outfit this system to a minimum capacity that includes at least 4x DIMMs, a NIC card, and at least 1x drive. On another note, and not included in that minimal setup, is up to 3x single-wide GPU accelerators or 1x double-wide card. Included in that list is the NVIDIA H100.

The control panel on the front features an optional vanity bezel and several LEDs for system status, the power ON button, and unit ID button. There is also a USB 3.1 port in the left server ear. Two basic storage configurations include an 8-bay configuration, and a 12-bay setup. The 8-bay version is the default configuration. As an option you can install 4x more drive bays. The first 8x can be outfitted with SAS, SATA or NVMe drive types with the optional 4x storage bays supporting SATA or NVMe storage devices. With this platform you can have a mix of drive types or go exclusively with one drive type.

On the back of the system, there are dual 1200W redundant Titanium level power supply units. A management port, dual USB 2.0 ports a VGA port and an Advanced IO module or AIOM slot compatible with OCP 3.0 standards. Then 3x PCIe ports. There are no integrated LAN ports other than the management port.

Supermicro does offer a few management tools to monitor system status with three main options. SuperDoctor 5 is for managing a single server. Supermicro ServerManager or SSM for managing several server nodes. Then there’s Supermicro SuperCloud Composer, which is relatively new. It delivers a software-defined composable infrastructure. SuperCloud Composer enables Administrators to manage the entire infrastructure through a single intuitive user interface and is compatible with Linux and other third-party management tools. SuperCloud allows you to deploy, provision, monitor and repurpose infrastructure assets on the fly. 

This option is more of a software, container-based system than say a traditional hardware asset virtualization-based system like with the Supermicro ServerManager. SSM does require licensing for each target node with either IMPI, Redfish or SuperDoctor 5 acting as the OS Agent. With Supermicro SuperCloud Composer, instead of a server node-based view of your infrastructure it pools storage, memory, GPUs, networking, and compute making for a composable and easy to reconfigure library of assets that can be grouped as needed to reduce complexity. You can also look at a single server or switch and get into some seriously granular detail. It is actually very cool with a brilliant user interface but we’re not getting into that.

Inside the case, the Supermicro 121H-TNR has a dense layout with drive cage up front. In this case, only showing the 8-bay backplane. If this was the 12-bay version, there would be an additional shorty backplane right beside it. Just behind the backplane a bank of 8x counter-rotating fans.

Then dual CPU sockets with 16x memory module slots, each, for a total of 32 slots, and then the 2x risers in back. The one in the middle, Riser 1, provides a single full-height, half-length slot with the IO mezzanine card slot underneath. The other riser has two full-height, full-length slots. All slots are PCIe 5.0 and feature a x16 slot with x16 link. Right next to the I/O mezzanine card slot are two PCIe 3.0 slots for NVMe/SATA M.2 drives, which when outfitted with 2x drives, can support a RAID for redundancy.

As a reminder, each PCIe generation doubles the supported bandwidth compared to the previous generation over the same number of PCIe lanes. In other words, with a PCIe x4 slot length and a x4 PCIe interface you would get a bandwidth of about 2GB/s over each lane for a total of up to 8GB/s transfer rate over that x4 slot interface. For PCIe 5.0 you can double those values to up to 4GB/s per lane and up to 16GB/s over a PCIe 5.0 x4 slot with x4 lanes. All good! 

As mentioned earlier, the Supermicro Hyper SuperServer 121H-TNR can support GPUs. Either 1x double-width card or up to 3x single-width cards. Only one supports a PCIe 5.0 interface. The Hopper architecture-based NVIDIA H100 80GB GPU. Other listed GPUs supported on this system include the NVIDIA RTX A5000 24GB, RTX A4000, L40S, and the L4. We’d imagine other GPUs are supported given the power draw on that H100 is at 350W. They’re probably just not tested. The H100, RTX A5000, and L40S are double-width cards, whereas the RTX A4000 and L4 are single width GPUs, but the A4000 featuring Ampere architecture is billed as the most powerful single-slot GPU for graphics applications. That L40S is no slouch either given it is the go-to for AI applications if you can’t get the H100 or RTX 6000 Ada GPUs. And no, that RTX 6000 Ada is not on the list, but we think you could add it.

There are 8x NVMe connectors on the motherboard for the default configuration with all NVMe drives up front. With the 12-bay setup you need an additional controller. If you want more RAID options, you would need a controller for that too.

This system supports virtual RAID on CPU or VROC for SATA and NVMe drive support offering limited RAID options of 0, 1, 5, and 10 but does require the Intel VROC key for all of those RAID options. Using a standard key will provide the same RAID just not RAID 10. 

If you go with a 5^th gen Intel Xeon Scalable CPU you can get up to 64 cores per CPU, plus increased memory speeds at up to 5600MT/s. Using 4^th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors only up to 60 cores apiece, and memory speeds will top out at 4800MT/s. For both, top memory speeds are only with 1 DIMM per memory channel and each CPU generation does provides 8-memory channel architecture. With two DIMMs per memory channel, you can achieve that top memory capacity of up to 8TB but memory speeds will be reduced to 4400MT/s. Only Registered DDR5 memory modules are supported.  

Supporting dual 5^th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, up to 8TB of memory, plus support for NVMe and up to 3x GPUs, the Supermicro Hyper SuperServer 121H-TNR has some pretty impressive credentials. This system can be configured to support a number of business-critical applications, and at only 1U, there is probably some room to squeeze it in with your existing infrastructure. 

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