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Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

I'd honestly never heard of Norco, but that's because Supermicro tends to be awesome.

They're essentially the OEM for a lot of Intel developer stuff now, too. Over the past 10 years, they went from "yet another commodity motherboard manufacturer" up to being the big white box option. They have basically replaced Dell and HP as the go to vendor for a lot of big deployments, although Dell and HP do better financing, Dell and HP have a few higher end products, and Dell/HP have better desktop/workstation/laptop products if you want a full suite from one vendor.

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You'd hear of Norco if you're on a budget, they're one of the many cut-rate brands. Supermicro charges roughly three times the price for enclosures, which do get the job done if you aren't bitten by firmware issues, but are by far not a budget brand compared to the competition out there.

I've actually considered some Norco enclosures in the past for a hobbyist project, but I had concerns over their hot swap backplanes -- mainly, a lot of reliability issues reported. Catching on fire pretty much settles it!

I've used http://www.aicipc.com/ for low-end. Or Chenbro, or Antec. (and eBay, or craigslist, or otherwise sourcing used stuff getting thrown out at a datacenter)

Thanks for the AIC pointer, it's hard to find much useful info when you're essentially ordering equipment from the finest brands DealExtreme has to offer.

Besides Supermicro and Chenbro and Dell and HP and IBM and (whats left of) Sun, who else is there to buy from? There doesn't seem to be any other brands anymore.

ASUS makes server mobos, but not cases (I'm not sure who's cases they're using for barebones units), and Antec makes low end server cases, but no barebones, and Intel makes pretty horrid server mobos but use someone else's cases for barebones.

Intel's someone else's cases = Supermicro, usually.

There's Penguin (Linux/HPC), iXsystems (FreeBSD/storage),and Tyan for "server barebones."

Usually I'd just pay these guys to build something: http://www.computerlink.net/

I'm pretty sure iXsystems uses supermicro cases as well, they just put their branding on them.

Apparently, Cisco also makes servers these days. No clue how good they are in any department (performance/reliability/costs), but they exist.

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