Building a Resilient IT Foundation: Supermicro and DataCore

Your Partner for Customised, High-Performance Infrastructure in Malta

In today’s data-driven world, a robust and scalable storage infrastructure is not a luxury—it’s the bedrock of business continuity and growth. Off-the-shelf solutions often force compromises on performance, cost, or future expansion. For over a decade, Sirap has been a leading partner for Supermicro in Malta, designing and deploying bespoke server and storage solutions. Supermicro’s global reputation is built on its “Building Block Solutions®” philosophy, offering unparalleled customisation, cutting-edge technology, and exceptional performance-per-watt, ensuring that businesses get precisely the hardware they need without paying for what they don’t.

The Powerhouse: Supermicro Storage Servers

Supermicro storage servers are engineered for the most demanding enterprise workloads, from high-transaction databases to large-scale virtualisation environments. These systems are not monolithic black boxes; they are highly configurable platforms built on the latest Supermicro X13 server generation. A typical high-performance build, like ones we have deployed for local businesses, is based on advanced motherboards like the X13DEI-T, which supports powerful multi-core Intel® Xeon® Gold or Silver processors and vast amounts of high-speed DDR5 ECC registered memory. This raw processing power is housed in versatile, high-density chassis like the 4U CSE-847BE1C4-R1K23LPB, which allows for a flexible mix of NVMe, SAS, and SATA drives to create optimised tiers for performance and capacity.

Case Study: The Ideal High-Availability Configuration

Imagine a typical Maltese business with 50-150 employees, reliant on a single, aging server that represents a critical point of failure. Any downtime means operations grind to a halt. The modern solution is to implement a resilient, zero-downtime infrastructure using a shared-storage cluster—and this is how we build it to professional standards. The foundation consists of two identically configured Supermicro 2U X13 SuperServers. Each server is equipped with dual Intel® Xeon® Silver processors and a substantial 256GB of DDR5 ECC RAM. This generous memory allocation is crucial: it not only supports numerous virtual machines but also powers DataCore SANsymphony’s high-speed caching, which dramatically accelerates application performance.

The storage within each server is meticulously tiered for optimal function:

• Hypervisor Boot: Two enterprise-grade 960GB SSDs in a hardware RAID 1 mirror, providing a fast and resilient boot volume for the virtualization host (like VMware ESXi or Hyper-V).

• DataCore Cache: Two high-endurance NVMe SSDs, also mirrored. This is the performance engine. All incoming data writes are committed to this ultra-low-latency tier first, giving applications near-instant acknowledgement.

• Capacity: A robust array of six to eight 16TB Enterprise SAS hard drives in a RAID 6 configuration, offering a vast pool of storage with dual-drive failure protection.

This hardware is unified by DataCore SANsymphony, which makes it the ideal solution. It creates a true active-active cluster, where both servers are servicing requests simultaneously. Data is synchronously mirrored between the two servers over a dedicated, high-speed 25GbE network link in real-time. If one server experiences a failure or needs to be taken down for maintenance, the other server instantly and transparently takes over the entire workload. For the end-users and virtual machines, there is zero perceived downtime. This configuration eliminates single points of failure and provides an enterprise-grade level of business continuity that was once only accessible to large corporations. It is the definitive way to tackle the need for uninterrupted operations.