SeaMicro SM15000: Data Center in a Box for Virtualization, Cloud Computing, and Big Data

Herman Chan
October 2, 2012

After being acquired by AMD earlier this year for $334M, SeaMicro™ has recently introduced the SM15000™, packing gobs of compute, networking, and storage in a 10U box. With a design focus on flexibility, density, and energy efficiency for virtualization, cloud computing, and big data loads, the SM1500 offers your choice of up to 64 AMD Opteron™, up to 64 Intel® Xeon® (“Ivy Bridge”, “Sandy Bridge”), and up to 256 Intel Atom® processors. When the folks at SeaMicro say “data center in a box”, they mean it. The AMD SeaMicro SM15000 server doesn’t fall short on memory nor storage, supporting up to 4 terabytes (TB) of RAM — 64 GB per Piledriver processor — and up to 64 SATA drives. Network connectivity is provided by up to (16) 10 GbE ports or up to (64) 1 GbE connections. Freedom Fabric Storage provides scaling for up to 1,408 solid state or hard disk drives.

So how do we power such a beast? While it supports up to 10 1100 watt power supplies, AMD suggests that the average power consumption of a fully-loaded system is in the range of 3200 watts. That means a 42U rack full of them will require ~12,800 watts (12.8kW). Since most customers will opt for the 10 power supplies in a 5+5 configuration, the iPDU in the rack will require a minimum of 20 outlets. Some customers may even go more extreme and drop 5 of them in a 54U rack, which will require iPDUs supporting 16kW and a minimum of 25 outlets. At these power densities, your only real options would be to run 50A 208V 3 phase circuits (14.4kW) to the rack or 60A 208V 3 phase circuits (17.3kW) or 30A 400V 3 phase circuits (16.6kW). Check out our iPDU product selector to find the one that suits you best. Search for the ones with C13 outlets.