SuperMicro 2029BT-HNC0R

The 2029BT-HNC0R is Supermicro's 2U BigTwin platform: four hot-pluggable nodes, each built on the Super X11DPT-B motherboard with an Intel C621 chipset, sharing chassis, power and cooling while remaining electrically and operationally independent. For a hosting provider, that means you can pull and service one node without touching the other three, and scale a rack in increments of four nodes rather than four full chassis. Each node carries dual Socket P (LGA 3647) support for 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, codenamed Cascade Lake, as well as first-generation Skylake parts. Dual UPI links run at up to 10.4GT/s, and each socket supports up to 28 cores with a CPU TDP range of 70-205W, though CPUs above 165W may need the extended thermal solution. BIOS 3.2 or later is required for Cascade Lake-R support. Memory scales to 24 DIMM slots per node and up to 6TB of 3DS ECC DDR4 running at 2933/2666/2400/2133MHz in RDIMM or LRDIMM form. Cascade Lake nodes can also take Intel Optane DCPMM for large in-memory datasets or persistent memory tiering - a genuine differentiator for database and in-memory analytics workloads where DRAM alone gets expensive fast. Storage and I/O are configured per node: six SAS3 (12Gbps) hot-swap 2.5in bays, or four NVMe plus two SAS3 bays, driven by a Broadcom 3008 controller running in IT mode, plus two M.2 slots (SATA or NVMe via the optional AOC-SMG3-2H8M2-B) reserved for boot. Expansion is two low-profile PCIe 3.0 x16 slots and one SIOM slot, which must be populated with a network card as the platform ships without on-board data networking - something to factor into any configuration. IPMI 2.0 with KVM-over-LAN and video via an ASPEED AST2500 BMC give full out-of-band management per node. Power comes from a shared pair of 2200W redundant supplies rated Titanium (96% efficiency), backed by four heavy-duty 8cm PWM fans with air shrouding across the chassis. For hyperconverged clusters, HPC nodes or hosting platforms running dense multi-tenant workloads, that shared infrastructure translates directly into lower power draw and rack space per node than equivalent 1U servers. Buying this model refurbished makes particular sense because the BigTwin architecture is built for scale-out: four nodes per chassis means the unit cost per compute node is already lower than standalone servers, and a tested, refurbished 2029BT-HNC0R gives you that density at a further reduced capital cost - useful when you're provisioning a cluster rather than a single machine and need the economics to work across dozens of nodes.