AMD has produced its first microserver with new acquisition SeaMicro which, surprisingly, comes with an Intel processor and is capable of managing vast quantities of data – ideal for big data in the age of cloud computing.
The AMD SeaMicro SM15000 server extends fabric-based computing across the racks and aisles of the data centre to connect massive disk arrays. This makes the server capable of supporting more than 5PB (yes, that’s petabytes, ie, 1,000 terabytes, or 1m gigabytes) of storage capacity.
“The rise of virtualisation, cloud computing, and big data require a new generation of compute in which networking and storage are equal partners in the solution. This does not fit the mould of traditional servers,” said Andrew Feldman, general manager and corporate vice-president of AMD’s Data Centre Server Solutions group.
A new wave of computing
“We are at the beginning of a new wave of computing that requires data centres to become pools of computing and storage resources with the flexibility to expand in both dimensions. The SM15000 system removes the constraints of traditional servers and allows data centres to expand compute, networking and storage independently,” he added. “By supporting the newest generation of processors, the SM15000 server will continue our tradition of being the highest-density, and most power-efficient microserver in the market.”
Saving space and energy is important to today’s data centres, and AMD claims the new SM15000 microserver provides the highest performance per watt, compute density and storage density, as well as the most bandwidth per unit compute, of any other microserver.
For now, the SeaMicro SM15000 comes with an Intel Xeon Sandy Bridge processor as AMD shows itself as willing to use its rival’s processors, which had always been used in SeaMicro’s servers before the acquisition. This trend is set to continue when servers using Intel’s Ivy Bridge processor are released in November, but by then AMD also plans to introduce a server using its own Opteron chip.
