TechPulse 360

Not since the advent of virtualization has the data center faced such an opportunity for change.

Low-cost, ultra-low-power servers – sometimes called microservers – may finally get a jolt of legitimacy.

On Monday, secretive Santa Clara start-up SeaMicro formally launched its long-awaited remake of the x86 server: a 512-processor box that doesn’t use Intel’s ubiquitous Xeon chips but low-power Atoms instead. Atoms are the processors sold in $300 netbooks – giving rise to the observation that SeaMicro’s SM10000 is really just a collection of netbooks stuffed in a one box.

Expect vendors such as Dell to begin making microservers. SeaMicro claims it will cut power use by 75 percent.

It’s an observation that is essentially true. The result is a server that uses one-quarter the power and takes up one-quarter the space while performing the same amount of work. CEO Andrew Feldman says Atom is three times more efficient in performance per watt than Xeon. The reason is it can better power down when not in use and doesn’t waste energy trying to anticipate future workloads, as Xeon does.

That is why the SeaMicro box is better suited to the Internet, where traffic is bursty and generally only places lightweight demands on a server.

The SM10000 is the brainchild of Gary Lauterback, a former AMD fellow and Sun Microsystems engineer, and “is an enormous transformation of the data center,” claims Feldman.

He may not be exaggerating. Zeus Kerravala, a long-time tracker of the server industry at Yankee Group, says: “As an analyst I am often skeptical of technologies people tout as revolutionary, but this one I was really impress with.” If Dell and other top tier vendors aren’t already thinking about microservers “I’d be surprised,” he says.

In truth, SeaMicro isn’t the first company to conceive of low-power servers or ones running Atom. Super Micro Computer launched a rack-mounted Atom blade last year, and Hewlett-Packard markets a $400 MediaSmart home-server with Atom. In Austin, TX, Smooth Stone is working on technology to bring even lower-powered ARM processors, those in many cell phones, to the server market.

Improved efficiency is what motivated cloud-computing vendor Rackable Systems to make use of small servers with modest power to handle fluctuating Internet workloads.

However, SeaMicro hopes to take Atom boxes a step further. The company built into the SM10000 a 1.28-terabit communications fabric powerful enough for a super computer and installed a custom ASICs to handle the complex load balancing for 512 processors. A single box can replace 40 dual-socket, quad-core servers, two Ethernet switches and two terminal servers, says Feldman.

It also shrank the size of processor motherboards to the size of a credit card, taking off unnecessary components and reducing the power draw.

According to IDC, the package may catch on with Web 2.0 companies. Companies spend $27 billion globally a year buying energy to run their servers, the research firm says. Most would die to reduce the bill.

“I think it is a radical approach” that Web 2.0 companies will quickly adopt for their public clouds, says research analyst Katherine Broderick.

The SeaMicro, which raised $25 million from backers including Khosla Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Crosslink Capital and received a $9.3 million Department of Energy grant, will make the box available in July. Selling for $139,000, it is likely to begin earning its investors a return.