Seamicro

History

2012: Presentation of the new platform

Seamicro purchased in February, 2012 by giant AMD for $334 million provided the energy saving server platform intended for cloud computing and Big Data on the market.

The platform consists of 10 units which include: 64 slots under computing cards - support up to 512 cores with capacity to 10 Gbit on each processor; up to 4 Tbyte of RAM of DDR3 DRAM, 64 Gbytes on each processor; up to 64 disks SATA or other hard drives; free space to equal 1408 hard drives; 16 ten-gigabit Ethernet links or up to 64 one-gigabit channels.

The platform works with such systems as Windows, Linux, Red Hat. And also has support of hypervisors of VMware and Citrix XenServer. Work with infrastructure of DPC becomes simpler at the expense of an exception of a top rack of switching, balancing of the console of the server.

The new platform according to the statement of AMD consumes a quarter of power of the similar systems and occupy the sixth part of the square selected under similar projects.

The new platform works as with chips of production of AMD, and Intel.

The new platform is intended first of all for cloud computing and Big Data. According to AMD, this direction will dynamically develop in the light of the continuing growth of interest in "clouds" and other of calculation based on DPCs.

AMD is going to keep the platform in a line of the products and to submit a market segment, new to itself.

2015: AMD stops SeaMicro business

On April 16, 2015 announced AMD the leaving from the market of energy efficient microservers of high density after three years of work on it. The American corporation decided to focus on more productive solutions.^[1]

High density servers which began to offer AMD after purchase of SeaMicro company in 2012 are equipped with hundreds of the Intel processors Atom and Xeon and are focused first of all on providers of cloud services who are interested in reduction of energy consumption in the data centers.

AMD abandons the market of high density servers

In AMD reported that failure from microservers of high density is connected with the strategy of the company directed to simplification and increase in efficiency of investment work. The producer of processors completely left the business connected with solutions of SeaMicro, on April 17, 2015. This step led to write-off at a loss $75 million during the first quarter 2015.

AMD did not specify future SeaMicro (whether it will be sold or abolished), but noted that will save at itself the intellectual property belonging to the company in the field of the network switching structures.

It should be noted that the largest buyer of the SeaMicro servers for all the time of their existence Verizon is considered. In October, 2013 this North American telecommunication operator decided to transfer the infrastructure of public clouds and data storage to the SeaMicro SM15000 system and architecture of Freedom Fabric. The cost of the contract is unknown.^[2]

According to the CEO of AMD Lisa Su, servers of high density did not provide the company of the expected growth rates. Therefore the producer decided to concentrate on more profitable server directions, including chips on architecture of ARM and x86. AMD promises to save investment into other server solutions, including clouds, virtualization and high-performance computing.

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