Supermicro
SuperServer 8015C-TB Barebone Platform: $2,200
www.supermicro.com

LOOKING FOR A COMPACT SERVER LOADED WITH PROCESSING HORSEPOWER? Supermicro’s SuperServer 8015C-TB leverages incredible performance potential thanks to an incredible motherboard/chassis combination. The Super X7QCE board features four 604-pin sockets, each able to take a dual-core Xeon 7200 series chip or a quad-core Xeon 7300 series CPU. That’s a maximum of 16 cores in a 1U form factor. Of course, any business customer gunning for that much firepower is also going to be looking for plenty of memory. The same board hosts 24 240-pin FB-DIMM slots too, totaling up to 192GB of RAM. Incredible, right?

With so many sockets and slots, you wouldn’t think Supermicro would have room for anything else. But the SuperServer 8015C-TB offers a dual-port Gigabit Ethernet controller, an integrated ATI ES100 graphics chip, and a sextet of SATA ports with support for RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 in Windows.

SONICWALL
Aventail EX-750 SSL VPN: $3,995
www.sonicwall.com

YOU CAN BUILD THE MOST ELEGANT, WELL-SECURED SMB NETWORK possible with a server, workstations, networked printing, and storage available to everyone. But once you start introducing remote clients who need the same functionality as employees on-site, the situation gets a little more complicated.

SonicWALL’s lineup of SSL VPNs makes accessing a corporate network easy and, more importantly, safe. But there are a handful of capabilities its new Aventail E-Class VPNs handle better than the company’s older SSL VPNs. Access control on the new EX-750, for example, is much more granular, meaning your customer can define access by IP range, subnet, domain, time of day, and so on. There’s also comprehensive mobile device support in addition to full endpoint control.

SonicWALL says the Aventail VPNs are for enterprises, but its EX-750, with support for up to 50 concurrent users, looks like the VPN for SMBs simply interested in tighter security.

AIS
IP19L300-M1 19” Rugged LCD Monitor: $1,350
www.aispro.com

TECHNOLOGY IS PRETTY FICKLE when it comes to resisting the elements. Cold weather, hot weather, dust, bumps, water, scratches—they all have the potential to wreak havoc on pricey hardware. But when your customer’s business is outside, there’s simply no getting around the weather. Fortunately, AIS sells a full line of durable displays specifically designed to resist the harsh elements.

The IP19L300-L1 is a 19” LCD housed in a steel enclosure resistant to both water and dust. AIS says the monitor is good for factory automation, military installments, and marine applications. We’d add agricultural and oil/gas to that list—anywhere you’d expect a standard LCD to quickly get beat up. The enclosure is EMI shielded to prevent interference and equipped with a 15-pin VGA input for near-universal connectivity. Customers who need even more functionality can use the IP19300-M1 with AIS’s optional sunlight-readable monitor or embedded touch screen options.

ASUS
KFN4-DRE Server Motherboard: $369
www.asus.com

DO YOU ALREADY HAVE CUSTOMERS LINING UP TO SEE WHAT AMD'S quad-core Barcelona processors are all about? The next-gen chips will work on a number of older Opteron-enabled server boards, but they sacrifice a lot of the new chip’s capacity for power savings. Taking full advantage of the Opteron’s updated architecture means investing in a fresh platform such as ASUS’ KFN4-DRE.

The KFN4 centers on NVIDIA’s nForce Professional 2200 chipset. The SSI EEB 3.61-compliant board includes two processor sockets, each able to take a quadcore Opteron. Sixteen DDR2 memory slots enable platforms with as much as 64GB of RAM. Other built-in extras include two Broadcom PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controllers and XGI’s Z9 graphics chip with 32MB of memory.

Optimized for rackmount applications, matching the KFN4-DRE up to a pair of 2000 series Opteron chips is a great way to help your customer enable massive compute horsepower in an efficient package.