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AWS CEO Andy Jassy Follows Apple In Calling For Retraction of Chinese Spy Chip Story (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, followed Apple's lead in calling the for the retraction of Bloomberg's story about spy chips being embedded in servers. "They offered no proof, story kept changing, and showed no interest in our answers unless we could validate their theories," Jassy wrote in a tweet on Monday. "Reporters got played or took liberties. Bloomberg should retract."
Apple CEO Tim Cook told Buzzfeed on Friday that the scenario Bloomberg reported never happened and that the October story in Bloomberg Businessweek should be retracted. Bloomberg alleged data center hardware used by Apple and AWS, and provided by server company Super Micro, was under surveillance by the Chinese government, even though almost all the companies named in the report denied Bloomberg's claim. Bloomberg published a denial from AWS alongside its own report, and AWS refuted the report in a more strongly worded six-paragraph blog post entitled "Setting the Record Straight on Bloomberg Businessweek's Erroneous Article." Further reading is available via The Washington Post.
"Sources tell the Erik Wemple Blog that the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and The Post have each sunk resources into confirming the story, only to come up empty-handed," the Washington Post reports. "(The Post did run a story summarizing Bloomberg's findings, along with various denials and official skepticism.) It behooves such outlets to dispatch entire teams to search for corroboration: If, indeed, it's true that China has embarked on this sort of attack, there will be a long tail of implications. No self-respecting news organization will want to be left out of those stories. 'Unlike software, hardware leaves behind a good trail of evidence. If somebody decides to go down that path, it means that they don't care about the consequences,' Stathakopoulos says.'"
Apple CEO Tim Cook told Buzzfeed on Friday that the scenario Bloomberg reported never happened and that the October story in Bloomberg Businessweek should be retracted. Bloomberg alleged data center hardware used by Apple and AWS, and provided by server company Super Micro, was under surveillance by the Chinese government, even though almost all the companies named in the report denied Bloomberg's claim. Bloomberg published a denial from AWS alongside its own report, and AWS refuted the report in a more strongly worded six-paragraph blog post entitled "Setting the Record Straight on Bloomberg Businessweek's Erroneous Article." Further reading is available via The Washington Post.
"Sources tell the Erik Wemple Blog that the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and The Post have each sunk resources into confirming the story, only to come up empty-handed," the Washington Post reports. "(The Post did run a story summarizing Bloomberg's findings, along with various denials and official skepticism.) It behooves such outlets to dispatch entire teams to search for corroboration: If, indeed, it's true that China has embarked on this sort of attack, there will be a long tail of implications. No self-respecting news organization will want to be left out of those stories. 'Unlike software, hardware leaves behind a good trail of evidence. If somebody decides to go down that path, it means that they don't care about the consequences,' Stathakopoulos says.'"
My experience with them is a few years old, and it's from the finance industry, so not directly related to using them for cloud services. SuperMicro sells on price and density. SuperMicro have products that are two complete, fully independent servers in a 1U rack enclosure. They're also very cheap. Now to achieve this, something's got to give, so there are some compromises.
SuperMicro servers aren't as feature-rich as something you'll get from Dell or HP. For example the out-of-band management isn't as sophisticated, the storage controllers aren't as configurable, and you don't have as many options for NIC modules. The build quality isn't spectacular either - they're definitely not as physically robust or convenient to work on as a Dell PowerEdge.
In terms of performance, they weren't really competitive with Dell or IBM for single-CPU throughput or wire-to-wire latency. Whether this is important or not depends heavily on your application. If you're doing something like online transaction processing where latency isn't critical, you might get better overall performance by going with SuperMicro and making the most of the higher density and lower price. But that's not going to help you if your application depends on good wire-to-wire latency.
Failure rates weren't much worse than HP really. After-sales support from SuperMicro isn't great, but remember you're paying a lot less. If you're prepared to do more of your service/support in-house rather than dealing with the manufacturer or a value-added reseller, SuperMicro might be better value.
TL;DR SuperMicro's offerings aren't as good in terms of performance, build-quality and vendor support, but they try to make up for it with low cost and high density. Depending on your application, it may be a win.