AMD’s just announced SeaMicro SM15000 server and Freedom Fabric Storage is pushing density limits by packing up to 512 compute cores with 4TB of RAM into a 10 RU system, connecting into up to more than five petabytes of disk storage. Unusually, the first units available will feature chips from rival Intel, with models based on new AMD chips coming in a couple of months.
AMD’s embrace of Intel technology is the result of its February acquisition of SeaMicro – which previously focused on building energy efficient, high density servers based on Intel x86 and Atom chips. While SeaMicro will continue to ship Intel-based servers, including ones with that company’s next generation “Ivy Bridge” chips, it will also introduce servers driven by AMD’s 8-core “Piledriver” chips in November.
SeaMicro’s Freedom Fabric – which hitherto linked up to 64 CPU/RAM motherboards together for compute parallelisation – has been extended to include storage outside of the compute enclosure – up to 1,408 disk drives, with more than five petabytes of storage.
Comments Dr. Amr Awadallah, CTO and founder at Cloudera: “The big data community is hungry for innovations that simplify the infrastructure for big data analysis while reducing hardware costs.”
According to one AMD comparison to a typical Hadoop cluster, the SeaMicro server approach uses one third of the rack space, and draws half the power, and works out at half the price:.
