Verizon is building out seven new cloud data centers using servers from its partner, SeaMicro, the energy-saving hardware designer that is now part of AMD. With the SeaMicro SM15000 servers, Verizon claims to be getting 50% more energy efficiency than a conventional design in one-third the formerly required space.
That’s because the SeaMicro design puts a standard Intel or AMD chip on a credit-card-size motherboard along with a few other components, including an ASIC chip that has been programmed with SeaMicro’s Supercomputer Fabric high-speed networking at 1.28 terabits per second.
Verizon engineers and SeaMicro’s have worked on the SM15000 for the last two years, including in March 2012 when SeaMicro was acquired by AMD. The product is a package that fits into 10u of the standard 42u server rack, but contains 64 AMD Opteron servers, each with eight cores. It can also run Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs. The unit pools its disk drives as a shared resource for the virtual machines running on it.
The unit allows a greater degree of automation throughout the cloud data center and more enterprise-oriented service-level agreements than most public cloud suppliers, said Andrew Feldman, corporate VP and general manager of servers at AMD, in the announcement.