Stefan Mileschin

AMD has announced the SeaMicro SM15000 server - and it claims it's the first to optimise the micro server for big data.

The SM15000 uses Freedom Fabric Storage, which connects directly to huge disk arrays, meaning a single 10 rack unit system which, according to AMD, can support over five petabytes of low cost, easy install storage, which the company claims is ideal for big data applications such as Apache, Hadoop, and Cassandra, for both public and private cloud.

It's available now, and supports Intel's Sandy Bridge Xeon E3-1260L. In November, it will support AMD Opteron with the power core, as well as for Ivy Bridge and the Xeon E3-1265Lv2. AMD boasts that the fabric technology is a key "building block" for partners to work on highly energy efficient micro servers for customers.

By bringing Freedom Supercompute Fabric together with Freedom Fabric Storage, the Seamicro system lets data centres provide over five petabytes of storage with 64 servers in one, 17.5 inch tall 10 rack unit. When disks are interconnected with the fabric , they are then shared with all servers running on the system, a luxury usually afforded to more complex systems.

The microserver can provide up to 10 gigabits per second of bandwidth to eachCPU, and connect up to 1,408 solid state or hard drives using Fabric Storage. It delivers, AMD claims, up to 16 10 GbE uplinks, or up to 64 1GbE uplinks. AMD's machine runs on off the shelf OS' including Windows, Linux, Red Hat, VMware, and Citrix XenServer hypervisors.

Because the SM15000 is available with 64 compute cards - each with a custom single socket octal-core 2.0/2.3/2.8 GHz Opteron processor based on Piledriver - it has a total of 512 cores per system, or 2,048 cores in a rack. An Opteron processor can run 64 gigabytes of DRAM, meaning one system can work with over four terabytes of DRAM, and over 16 terabytes of DRAM per rack.

It also has 16 fabric extender slots, which can each connect to three different Fabric Storage arrays with different capacities. The FS 5084-L can support up to 84 SAS/SATA 3.5 inch or 2.5 inch drives in five rack units for up to 336 terabytes of capacity per array, and over five per system, for an ultra dense capacity optimised option. The FS 2012-L is capacity optimised, supporting up to 12 3.5 inch or 2.5 inch drives in two rack units, which is up to 48 terabytes of capacity per array, or up to 768 terabytes per system, while the FS 2024-S is performance optimised, supporting up to 24 2.5 inch drives in two rack units, for up to 24 terabytes of capacity per array, or 384 per system.

It is generally available immediately in the US and some other international regions on Sandy Bridge, while Ivy Bridge and Opteron will appear in November.

http://news.techeye.net/hardware/amd...amicro-sm15000