Supermicro and Intel SGX in Gcore Cloud infrastructure

We strive to make our Cloud as secure and technologically advanced as possible to solve our clients’ wide range of tasks. Today, we’d like to speak about our cooperation with Supermicro. Together with the Intel SGX technology, their servers help us build a truly secure and powerful infrastructure for our customers.

You can watch the video about our collaboration or read the text below.

Advantages of Supermicro Twin servers

Supermicro is a world-leading manufacturer of servers and their components, as well as data storage and transmission technologies.

One of the company’s main products is a lineup of Twin server systems. Thanks to their special architecture, they provide high throughput while physically isolating the traffic on every computing node. This makes them both powerful and secure.

The Twin family includes many high-performance and reliable models. For example, the Supermicro BigTwin server systems, which possess four computing nodes in the 2U form factor.

Each node supports:

• 2 × 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors
• 6 × NVMe/SAS/SATA drives
• 16 × DDR4-3200 DIMMs with a capacity of up to 2 TB
• Intel Optane DC P4800X SSD
• Intel D3-S4510 SSD
• 2 × 10GbE AIOMs
• 2 × 25GbE LP NICs

Such architecture is incredibly powerful, secure, and ensures high throughput while maintaining low energy consumption.

Intel SGX in Gcore Cloud and Supermicro

Data security is critical for many of our clients, including companies from fintech, retail, e-commerce, and gamedev. Therefore, together with Supermicro, we try to make our products as secure as possible.

This is facilitated by the Intel SGX technology, which provides a set of CPU operation codes to place private data and code into enclaves (private memory regions). Information in such enclaves is reliably protected from any external threats.

As a result, this technology creates additional protection from unauthorized access and modification: neither the cloud provider nor any external actor can gain access, even if the cloud servers are compromised.

In Gcore Cloud, we integrated Intel SGX into our virtual machines.

Supermicro integrated the technology into its Twin physical servers. About 50% of server memory is allocated to enclaves. This makes the servers even more secure and allows them to store and process the most sensitive data.

Supermicro products in Gcore Cloud infrastructure

We use various Supermicro servers in our Cloud, including those of the Twin series.

To a certain extent, these powerful and secure servers form the backbone of our cloud infrastructure. We offer our clients cloud solutions with different configurations, some of them based on Supermicro servers.

To get a deeper understanding of how our solution works with Intel SGX and Supermicro, let’s see an example where Gcore Cloud is used with Managed Kubernetes. In this case, two configurations can be implemented.

Collaboration with Supermicro and Intel helps us provide top-notch cloud services to our customers, making our Cloud fast, productive, and secure.

Summary

1. We seek to make our Cloud as secure as possible for our customers. Supermicro servers and the Intel SGX technology help us achieve this goal.
2. Supermicro is a global leader in data storage and data transmission equipment. Their secure Twin series servers handle high workloads brilliantly.
3. Together with Supermicro, we enhance the security of our products by using Intel SGX, a technology that hides private data and code in enclaves (private memory regions).
4. Supermicro servers and Intel SGX are core elements of our cloud infrastructure.

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