AMD Unleashes First SeaMicro Micro-Server ... Running Intel
The new SeaMicro SM15000 server, which enables a combo of compute power and storage in the data center, will get Opteron in November, Advanced Micro Devices says.
Advanced Micro Devices this week introduced its first SeaMicro server combining processing power and add-on storage capacity that the company said makes it possible to install thousands of cores plus five petabytes of storage in a single data center server rack.
And guess what—the new SeaMicro SM15000 server is running Intel.
AMD said it is readying its own next-generation Opteron server chips with new cores code named Piledriver for the SM15000 by November. For now, though, the micro-server takes Intel's low-power Xeon E3-1260L, a 2.4GHz, quad-core Sandy Bridge-based processor that runs at 45 watts and was released last April. In November, the SM15000 will also be available with the forthcoming Xeon E3-1265Lv2.
Though AMD and Intel have long been bitter rivals, this isn't a particularly surprising development. The smaller chip maker knew when it that the micro-server and data center fabric developer made its bones building low-power, core-distributed boxes powered by Intel Atom processors. And while AMD is clearly eager to get its own chips into future SeaMicro products, the company appears to be admirably averse (for now, at least) to turning its new micro-server business into a dumping ground for Opteron parts that probably aren't ready yet for the technology it bought.
The big advantage for the data center that AMD is pitching with its new product is the addition of significant storage capacity to server racks courtesy of the company's new Freedom Fabric Storage technology.
Freedom Fabric "enables a single 10 rack unit system to support more than five petabytes of low-cost, easy-to-install storage," a configuration that AMD calls "ideal for big data applications like Apache Hadoop and Cassandra for public and private cloud deployments."
That's in line with the vision AMD when it announced the SeaMicro deal back in February. At the time, AMD representatives said they believed SeaMicro's unique fabric was a major innovation in data center technology, characterizing the platform as a "new server building block" which would increasingly make its way into the growing cloud infrastructure space.
Then-SeaMicro CEO Andrew Feldman, now the general manager of AMD's Data Center Server Solutions unit, was equally enthusiastic at the time.
"When you're talking about the ability to tie together large amounts of processor cores, hundreds and even thousands, within a server system, there aren't a lot of choices out there [in terms of competitors], particularly if you want to bring Ethernet over it and disk traffic over it, there's just us," he said in February.
This week, Feldman made the case that the integration of storage with processing capabilities was just as crucial to cloud build-out as tying computing and networking infrastructure more tightly together in the data center fabric.
"Historically, server architecture has focused on the processor, while storage and networking were afterthoughts. But increasingly, cloud and big data customers have sought a solution in which storage, networking, and compute are in balance and are shared," he said.
"AMD's SeaMicro SM15000 server enables companies, for the first time, to share massive amounts of storage across hundreds of efficient computing nodes in an exceptionally dense form factor. We believe that this will transform the data center compute and storage landscape."