SeaMicro, a Silicon Valley pioneer of low power server technology, today emerged from stealth mode to launch a new Internet-optimized x86-server that reduces by 75 percent the power and space used by servers.
In development for three years, the SM10000 is the ultimate re-think of the volume server.
Specifically optimized for the workloads and traffic patterns of the Internet, SeaMicro’s SM10000 integrates 512 Intel Atom processors with Ethernet switching, server management and application load-balancing to create a “plug and play” standards-based server that dramatically reduces power draw and footprint without requiring any modifications to existing software.
The key benefits of the SM10000 include:
- using one-quarter of the power and taking one-quarter of the space to do the same work as the best-in-class volume server,
- industry leading density: 2,048 central processing units (CPUs) per standard rack,
- drop–in adoption by running off-the-shelf OSs and applications without change,
- flexible architecture that can support any CPU.
Reports from Google show that if current power trends continue, the cost of energy consumed by a server during its lifetime could surpass the initial purchase cost.
In addition, the Environmental Protection Agency reports that volume servers consume more than one percent of the total electricity in the US—representing billions of dollars in wasted operating expense each year.
SeaMicro invented and patented a new technique in CPU I/O virtualization, which dramatically reduces non-CPU power draw by eliminating 90 percent of the components from the motherboard. This CPU I/O virtualization allows SeaMicro to shrink a server motherboard from the size of a pizza box to the size of a credit card.
SeaMicro designed a supercomputer-style interconnect fabric that can link 512 mini-motherboards into a single system with an order-of-magnitude reduction in power draw and space. This fabric provides 1.28 terabits per-second throughput, with complete security and redundancy.
Additionally, the architecture can support any CPU instruction set and any protocol, including Ethernet, fibre channel, and data center Ethernet.
SeaMicro also invented Dynamic Compute Allocation Technology (DCAT). DCAT combines CPU management and load balancing, allowing the SM10000 to dynamically allocate workloads to specific CPUs on the basis of power-usage metrics. This ensures that the active CPUs operate in the most energy-efficient utilization ranges.In addition, DCAT technology enables compute pooling—allowing the user to create pools of compute for a given application. This enables the user to dynamically add compute resources to the pool based on predefined utilization thresholds.
The SM10000 simplifies data center operations and management by eliminating layers of switches, terminal servers and load-balancing devices. The system is built on standards-based x86 CPUs, which means it is plug and play – customers can deploy the SM10000 without modifications to existing operating systems, application software or management tools.
SeaMicro’s SM10000 system is comprised of:
- 512 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processors
- 1 terabyte of DRAM
- 0 – 64 SATA solid state or hard disk drives
- 8 – 64 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks; or 2 – 16 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplinks
- The entire system is 10 rack units tall (17.5 inches tall).
SeaMicro was founded by industry veterans with expertise in building large data centers and cluster computers.They come from leading technology companies including Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Sun Microsystems, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
The company has raised $25 million from strategic partners and venture capitalists including Khosla Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Crosslink Capital. SeaMicro was also awarded a $9.3 million grant from the Department of Energy, which was the largest grant awarded to a server company in the Information and Communication Technology Sector.
The SeaMicro SM10000 will be generally available July 30, 2010 in the U.S. and select international locations. The list price for a base configuration is $139,000.
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