SeaMicro’s low-power server, the SM10000, arrives at a crossroads in the computer industry: Demand for cloud computing centers keeps growing along with the energy required to operate them. Sure, IBM, HP, Dell and other server makers have jumped on the cloud bandwagon, but instead of helping their enterprise customers transition to a low-power, cloud-enabled future, they’re hellbent on delivering “cloud solutions” anchored on tweaked versions of their existing server, storage and networking products.
Not SeaMicro. The company ditched the typical volume server architecture and instead outfitted its system with 512 Intel Atom processors, the same chips that help netbooks give their owners several hours of computing time between battery charges. Along with some dynamic workload management, the system can deliver web pages and other non-compute-intensive functions typical of many web services…
