In the first announcement following AMD’s acquisition of low power server startup SeaMicro earlier this year, AMD on Monday announced a new server platform based on the SeaMicro tech that’s optimized for big data and cloud computing. The newly-announced “SM15000″ server tech supports 5 petabytes of storage and brings storage closer to compute, making the system faster and more resilient.
In addition, AMD announced new compute cards for its server tech, one based on AMD’s Opteron processor, and one based on Intel’s Ivy Bridge processor. “We see offering both Intel and AMD support for the foreseeable future,” said Andrew Feldman, AMD General Manager and co-founder and CEO of SeaMicro. Both the AMD and Ivy Bridge based tech will be available in November.
Feldman explained why AMD wanted to move storage closer to compute by saying: “With all this data you don’t know what you need.” Customers need these types of options in the early days of big data, said Feldman.
The announcement represents chip maker AMD’s goal to double down on the server market, which it needs to win over since it has failed in the mobile market. AMD’s new servers are aimed at the emerging webscale and cloud computing market, and are fundamentally different machines than those built by HP, Dell and IBM. Feldman said the machines are ideal for Hadoop clusters, and for virtualized environments like cloud computing.
In this era of webscale computing, power is a primary concern for data centers, and that trend is representing a rethink in the components and designs of data centers. ” SeaMicro pioneered the “micro server,” which uses a quarter of the power and one sixth of the space of a traditional server. AMD bought the company for $ 334 million in February.
