Splitting the server atom
In a market dominated by powerful, but power-hungry, Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors, SeaMicro is bucking the trend in using the humble Intel Atom to create highly scalable and remarkably energy-efficient servers.
Its first product, the 32-bit SM10000, was launched last year, and now there's a 64-bit version, cramming 256 dual-core N570 Atom processors into a 10U rack unit. A feat which, the company claims, enables it to match the processing power of high-end industry-standard servers, but in a quarter of the space and using a quarter of the energy.
The specifications for the new SM10000-64 are impressive. As well as 512 computing cores, there's support for 1,024 terabytes of DDR3 memory with a 4GB per processor ceiling set by the 1.66GHz Atom processors.
Effectively a highly dense blade server, the SM10000-64 deploys the Atom chips, four at a time, on a set of 64 hot-pluggable server cards. These plug into a custom backplane tucked inside the 10U enclosure — much as in conventional blade solutions from the likes of HP, IBM and Dell — but using standard PCI-Express interfaces to connect the servers to integrated networking switches (Gigabit or 10GbE) and with an integrated load balancer to tie everything together.
Like its more conventional competitors, the SM10000-64 also sports a high level of redundancy — and not just in processor cards, but power supplies, cooling fans and network interfaces too.
Storage can also be accommodated inside the 10U enclosure, with room for up to 64 conventional spindles or SSD devices at the front of the chassis. Plus there's built-in virtualisation to seamlessly connect and share virtual disks across individual servers. Fibre Channel connectivity, however, isn't mentioned.
Linux is the officially supported software platform, with SeaMicro claiming to match the computing power of forty 1U dual-socket quad-core servers with its much slimmer 10U solution. More than that, it reckons on being able to make a big dent in running costs, with an up to 75 percent reduction in power consumption.
Importantly too, the Atom N570 is an x64 processor, so can run mainstream operating system and application software compiled for Xeon and Opteron chips, unaltered. Support for Intel's VT-x technology provides the ability to run Xen, KVM and other virtualisation platforms, similarly, straight out of the box.
Impressive it may be — and there's talk of quad-core Atoms and other processors in the future — but whether customers will be willing to bet on the success of a relatively new start-up or prefer to stick with the big boys, remains to be seen.
Details on price are pretty sketchy, SeaMicro quoting a US list of $148,000 for a 'base configuration' without actually detailing what that configuration might be. Moreover, European prices have yet to be announced: so far we've only tracked down the one distributor over here, Klassic Computers.
Alan Stevens