Wholesale vs. retail? They probably don’t want to deal with 1000 HNer accounts buying a single chip and do credit checks on them all (or do retail at all).
That's exactly it. Normally they direct you to an OEM partner like Exxact.
To be honest, they are really not set up for individual accounts. It was a bit of back and forth with the paperwork to get everything done, which took a lot of time.
They asked for everything about the business.
As for the direct account, once you have it, it is a golden egg because this way you also have direct support from their teams for anything you need. It is fantastic and I feel lucky to have gotten in.
Shipped a SYS-531A-IL workstation in less than a week including a weekend as my latest workstation configured with my chosen, albeit from a limited selection of memory, good CPUs and NVME and SATA drives (enterprise options for all of those), all properly kept cool per lm-sensors and smartmontools. I used their live chat to quickly get a couple of answers, it was packed well, and in theory for a reasonable up front cost they'll cross ship a replacement for the next 5 years.
When Mr. Rsync.net was composing his message today I was adjusting my scripts to do their nightly backup to his service that uses their servers.
For a couple of decades have bought a bunch of their motherboards through resellers for myself and family, and built some rack mount systems for a friend bought I forget from where with excellent results. The current swapping of hardware due to the above purchase took down a system that had been in service for a dozen years.
See also its Nvidia equivalent https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/gpu/8u/as-8125... which is implicitly on allocation because TSMC has been contracted to make only so many H100 chips per unit of time, I think I heard 550,000 for 2023. I remember seeing that the Nvidia cards list at around $30K each....
I think the store is more for stuff that's in more plentiful supply and less ITAR restricted, with a limited number of SKUs and options for each that they're prepared to support for a long time.
I worked for a much much smaller customer than yourself several years back.
The store never showed the server boards in stock that we were after. We had to go in via a disty to get anything of value. The impression we got was that nothing was staying in stock very long, and at the time there were enough part shortages that they seemed to be slightly modifying SKU's at a rapid enough rate that it didnt make financial sense to keep the hobbyists happy.
Not surprising back when chip shortages were severe, and while checking out all their workstations I did note one of their oldest SKUs having a CPU option disappear in the process. Some of that might count as clearance but there's reasons to not be on the bleeding edge.
As I'm finding with a Raptor Lake CPU and conservative stock Debian 12 bookworm and it's 6.1 kernel, largest format video playing has some tearing and so on due to driver support based on the error messages I'm seeing, 720p is much better. At the bottom of the stack root ZFS is rock solid: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting%20Started/Deb...
Today availability should be different and skimming their rackmount SKUs the vast majority claim "Ships Within 3-5 Business Days" which was my experience with a tower workstation.
I went to the above few minutes of effort because the company has done very well for me and mine in the last couple of decades, and people who are buying small quantities which certainly includes small or startup businesses as well as "hobbyists" shouldn't think the old shortages still hold in a period where I hear general demand is down outside of AI platforms. And prices are certainly pretty good.
To be honest, they are really not set up for individual accounts. It was a bit of back and forth with the paperwork to get everything done, which took a lot of time.
They asked for everything about the business.
As for the direct account, once you have it, it is a golden egg because this way you also have direct support from their teams for anything you need. It is fantastic and I feel lucky to have gotten in.