The outfit said that its compact pole-mounted solution allows for rapid rollout of adaptable 5G networks with virtually zero real estate and are ideal for harsh outdoor environments and support the industry's movement toward open-source software and disaggregated hardware.

Supermicro CEO Charles Liang said: “Supermicro’s highly configurable SuperServers for extreme outdoor use give data centre and telco operators unprecedented new deployment options rivalling industry competitors.”

In addition to CPU options, Supermicro’s new systems take advantage of the latest FPGA and GPU acceleration with three PCI-E slots for expansion capability. The company says this is critical for enhanced real-time edge AI inferencing via GPU cards and supporting 5G RAN software plus open-standard site-to-site communication with FPGA accelerator cards. With SSD, M.2, and EDSFF storage capabilities, these ruggedised servers can also distribute cached media content locally or store video surveillance and other sensitive data.

These 5G systems can be configured with a variety of processor and memory combinations so that customers can tailor their solutions to push data centre remote management to the intelligent edge.

Supermicro has extensive experience with popular virtualisation and container-optimised software such as Kubernetes to facilitate these interactions efficiently and has multiple servers certified NGC-Ready for Edge to extend AI capabilities across public and private networks.

These rugged servers being introduced build on Supermicro’s 5G and Edge computing portfolio, including the E403-9P-FN2T and the 1019P-FN2T systems introduced in 2019, and complement the company’s data centre products such as the multi-node BigTwin and high-density SuperBlade and MicroBlade, which can support the virtualised 5G network core.