Sea Micro defines a little green server

June 15, 2010 Dave Ohara

I've been blogging about the idea of a Little Green Server watching for companies who embrace the idea that smaller is better. I checked my blog and I wrote about the idea Intel Atom Servers in July 2008.

Sea Micro came out of its quiet period, and made quite a bit of noise.

The one I am waiting for next is ARM Servers.

From the momentum it looks like the idea of Intel Atom servers is going to be deployed.

SeaMicro in the News

June 14, 2010

Wall Street Journal: SeaMicro Tries to Rethink the Internet Server

Not many people start computer companies these days, with fierce competition and dog-eat-dog pricing making other businesses seem much more appealing. But SeaMicro is going for it, in an unusual way.

Read more

June 14, 2010

EE Times: Startup SeaMicro packs 512 Intel Atoms in server. SM10000 seen as first in wave of Atom, ARM-based servers

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Startup SeaMicro announced Monday (June 14) a server that packs 512 Intel Atom processors in a 10U chassis to deliver the same performance at a fraction of their power and space as systems using conventional server CPUs.

Read more

June 13, 2010

Venture Beat: SeaMicro drops an atom bomb on the server industry

Coming out of stealth, SeaMicro is dispelling the Silicon Valley myth that you can’t innovate in hardware anymore. The startup is announcing today it has created a server with 512 Intel Atom chips that gets supercomputer performance but uses 75 percent less power and space than current servers.

Read more

June 13, 2010

GIGAOM: SeaMicro’s Low-power Server Finally Launches

SeaMicro, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup building a low-power server using Atom chips and its own specially designed silicon to manage the networking, has finally unveiled its hardware, and it’s pretty darn impressive.

Read more

June 13, 2010

IDG/PC World: SeaMicro's Cloud Server Sports 512 Atom Processors

SeaMicro has developed a server that packs in 512 low-power Intel Atom processors on miniature motherboards the size of credit cards, the company announced Monday.

Read more

June 13, 2010

Fast Company: Google's Power-Hogging Server Farms Versus SeaMicro's Super-Efficient Supercomputers

The computer server industry may not sound like a hotbed for innovation to you, but SeaMicro thinks differently. It's just rocked the server world with a super-computer-like product that's smaller and more power-efficient than any rival's.

Read more

June 14, 2010

DailyTech: SeaMicro Launches Microtransaction Server Featuring 512 Atom CPUs

Taking multi-core to an extreme

Read more

June 14, 2010

earth2tech: SeaMicro Unveils Low Power Server

Get ready to start hearing a whole lot more about stealthy low-power server maker SeaMicro.

Read more

June 14, 2010

Data Center Knowledge: SeaMicro Unveils its Low Power Server

Startup server maker SeaMicro today unveiled a new low-power server that promises to slash power costs for companies running large Internet services and cloud computing platforms.

Read more

June 14, 2010

eWeek: SeaMicro Uses Intel Atom Chip in Server Architecture

Startup SeaMicro is unveiling its SM10000 server, which takes advantage of the small and highly energy efficient Intel Atom processors and its own I/O virtualization technology to create a computing architecture that is highly scalable and drives down server power and space costs by as much as 75 percent over traditional systems.

Read more

June 14, 2010

CRN UK: SeaMicro shakes up server arena

Start-up vendor SeaMicro has slammed what it sees as a lack of innovation in the server market as it launches into the UK channel.

Read more

June 14, 2010

Information Week: SeaMicro Intros Server With 512 Atom Processors

Silicon Valley startup SeaMicro has unveiled a 10U rack-mount server that uses 512 low-power, Intel Atom processors to dramatically cut energy consumption and space in the data center.

Read more

June 14, 2010

Wired: Startup Builds Power-Efficient Servers With Netbook Chips

Atom chips are the underpowered CPUs inside most netbooks. But one company has found a way to stitch 512 of them together to create a single powerful server.

Read more

June 14, 2010

CNET: Start-up launches DOE-backed green server

Start-up SeaMicro has launched a green server based on Intel's power-sipping Atom processor. The company is backed by about $25 million in venture capital and a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Read more

June 14, 2010

AnandTech: SeaMicro Announces SM10000 Server with 512 Atom CPUs and Low Power Consumption

Two years ago when I first covered Intel’s Atom architecture I proposed that Moore’s Law has paved the way for two things: 1) ridiculously fast microprocessors, and 2) fast enough microprocessors.

Read more

June 14, 2010

Server Watch: SeaMicro Launches an Atom-Powered Cloud Computing Server

With 512 Atom processors in a 10u rack mounted unit, SeaMicro is defying not just conventional wisdom of what makes a Web server, but server design as well.

Read more

January 06, 2010

Data Center Knowledge: SeaMicro, More Than Just Low-Power Servers

Stealthy startup SeaMicro isn’t saying much about its technology, which aims to “revolutionize the data center landscape” by slashing the power used in IT operations.

Read more

January 06, 2010

GigaOM: SeaMicro’s Secret Server Changes Computing Economics

SeaMicro, a stealthy server company based in Santa Clara, Calif., today scored $9.3 million from the Department of Energy as part of a program to encourage data center efficiency.

Read more

January 06, 2010

earth2tech: SeaMicro, A Server Maker That Could Change the Game of Computing Power

When the Department of Energy announced that it was awarding 14 data center efficiency projects $47 million this morning, one name piqued my interest: SeaMicro.

Read more

Data Centers As Cathedrals, building big

June 15, 2010 Dave Ohara

In three more days, I am going to Italy and taking a two week break from blogging. Spending a bunch of time in airports, trains, I was looking for a book to dig into. One book I found that would help get me thinking in another perspective is The Pillars of Earth.

Ken Follett wrote about something that is not considered exciting.

Even before his breakthrough novel, Ken was toying with the idea of an adventure tale surrounding one of his personal obsessions—cathedrals. "I gave it up because, instinctively, I felt like I couldn't do it. It was too ambitious," Ken says.

Still, Ken couldn't shake the idea. "It just kept building up, and when I told writer friends about it they said, 'What a great idea,'" Ken says. "Publishers weren't so keen. They said, 'Ken, you've had a lot of success with Nazis and secret agents and spies. And now this is a book…it's set in the Middle Ages, right Ken? And it's about building a church. Are you sure?'"

And Ken tried to change the way people think about cathedrals.

Oprah says this book will stay with anyone who reads it. "Nobody who reads it ever looks at a church or a cathedral the same," she says. "It made me think about my own life differently. … What a treasure you have given all of us."

Data Centers were bore and dull for the religion of IT. Built based on the financial sponsors from corporate.

But, now data centers are Pillars of Information for the Earth and major corporations - Google and Facebook could not exist without data centers.

Cathedrals went through major transformations as building technology changed. Data Centers are ready for major transformation as well.

2 months after BP spill sensor network deployed, shows you how important monitoring systems are for decision makers who don't know they don't have the data

June 13, 2010 Dave Ohara

MSNBC/AP has an article on a sensor network being deployed.

Sensors deployed to better track Gulf spill

Coast Guard says readings will validate estimates of oil gushing from well

The Transocean Discoverer Enterprise drill ship (with flare) collects oil from over the site of the BP oil well alongside support ships and relief wells as workers try to stem the flow of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

By HARRY R. WEBER, RAY HENRY

SCHRIEVER, Louisiana - Undersea sensors were being deployed to a ruptured well in the Gulf ofMexico on Sunday in an effort to better track the amount of oil gushing into the sea, the Coast Guard said, as pressure mounted on BP fromthe Obama administration and Gulf states to create special accounts that would set aside billions of dollars to pay for spill-related claims.

So, where did the estimates come from on the amount of oil spilled? Back of napkins?

Scientists have struggled to pin down just how much oil is spilling into the Gulf, and the government has stressed that the larger estimates were still preliminary and considered a worse-case scenario. The lead scientist in the effort said last week that the most credible range at the moment is between 840,000 gallons and 1.68 million gallons daily.

The Obama administration's point man on the oil spill, Adm. Thad Allen, said the sensors were going to be deployed Sunday and will start taking pressure readings to validate the estimates, which have been made by using such things as spillcam video and sonar readings.

So, there is no scientific data to support any claims on how much oil has spilled.

Wow. Shows you were people what people were thinking for the past 2 months. Somewhere buried was some scientists saying let's deploy a sensor network to measure the spill.

Connecting Manure, Water, and EPA - Amish face regulation

June 13, 2010 Dave Ohara

HP made news with its Manure powered data center.

NYTimes has an article on how the EPA is looking at the manure from Amish farmers and water pollution.

But farmers like Mr. Stoltzfus are facing growing scrutiny for agricultural practices that the federal government sees as environmentally destructive. Their cows generate heaps of manure that easily washes into streams and flows onward into the Chesapeake Bay.

And the Environmental Protection Agency, charged by President Obama with restoring the bay to health, is determined to crack down. The farmers have a choice: change the way they farm or face stiff penalties.

“There’s much, much work that needs to be done, and I don’t think the full community understands,” said David McGuigan, the E.P.A. official leading an effort by the agency to change farming practices here in Lancaster County.

There is an extremely low chance that HP could talk to the Amish to solve their manure problems with a data center.

Water supply is what has the EPA looking at the Amish.

Last September, Mr. McGuigan and his colleagues visited 24 farms in a pocket of Lancaster County known as Watson’s Run to assess their practices. Twenty-three of the farms were plain sect; 17 were found to be managing their manure inadequately. The abundance of manure was also affecting water quality. Six of the 19 wells sampled contained E. coli bacteria, and 16 had nitrate levels exceeding those allowed by the E.P.A.

Water is one of the most under appreciated earth resources, and thankfully the momentum continues to build to protect it.

If you don't think about how water use and how water waste affects your data center, get ready for a potential visit from a regulatory agency.

Are you acting like an Amish farmer who is stuck in the past?

Less is More Gains Momentum, including data centers

June 13, 2010 Dave Ohara

The Economist discusses the popularity of less is better in technology, and how it is growing in spite of technologies typical more is better.

But now there are signs that technologists are waking up to the benefits of minimalism, thanks to two things: feature fatigue among consumers who simply want things to work, and strong demand from less affluent consumers in the developing world. It is telling that the market value of Apple, the company most closely associated with simple, elegant high-tech products, recently overtook that of Microsoft, the company with the most notorious case of new-featuritis. True, Apple’s products contain lots of features under the hood, but the company has a knack for concealing such complexity using elegant design. Other companies have also prospered by providing easy-to-use products: think of the Nintendo Wii video-games console or the Flip video camera. Gadgets are no longer just for geeks, and if technology is to appeal to a broad audience, simplicity trumps fancy specifications.

One of the classic differences between Windows and Mac is you ask how to do something on the Mac, and there is one way. You ask the same question on Windows and there will many times be three or more. Which way do you think is better the one way or give people multiple ways. When you have the market share with the diversity of users then you collect the user data, develop the alternatives and test the usability. If you are Apple you figure out the one way to do it, hope Steve Jobs doesn't think your way is ridiculed, and the feature ships.

With the growth of Apple's iPod, iPhone, and iPad, figuring out the simple user interface is being accepted more.

Frugality is the mother of invention

And then there is the phenomenon of “frugal” innovation—the new ideas that emerge when trying to reduce the cost of something in order to make it affordable to consumers in places like China, India and Brazil. The resulting products often turn out to have huge appeal in the rich world too, especially in an era of belt-tightening. The netbook, or low-cost laptop, was inspired by a scheme to produce cheap laptops for children in poor countries, but has since proved popular with consumers around the world. Tata devised the Nano, the world’s cheapest car, with India’s emerging middle classes in mind; it is now planning to launch it in Europe, too, where there is growing demand for cheap, simple vehicles.

Apple and Google are fighting for the Mobile space, and as they point out, the fight can be about control.

The mobile space also offers something that Jobs craves: control. Unlike being able to buy pretty much any software program you want for the personal computer, with the iPad you’re locked in. There’s only one place to buy apps: Apple’s online App Store. And Jobs keeps a 30 percent cut of the revenue. As for ads, Jobs will sell those, too, and he’ll keep 40 percent. Of course, Jobs also sells music, movies, and books via his iTunes Store, keeping 30 percent. So instead of a one-time sale of a Mac, each iPhone and iPad becomes an ongoing revenue stream. No wonder Jobs is going all-in for mobile.

KC Mares discusses another thing that is better if less, Vibration.

The Data Center Vibration Penalty to Storage Performance

Every now and then a really great way to reduce energy use comes along that is so simple we all whack our head wondering, “why didn’t I think of that!” My principles of achieving ultra-efficient data centers (PUEs between 1.03-1.08; I call anything less than 1.10 ultra-efficient) are based upon simplicity and a holistic approach while meeting the need not the want or convention. Generally the simpler the better, as simple is always lower cost up front and ongoing, as well as easier to maintain, more reliable and more efficient.

As KC mentions, think about all the equipment causing vibration.

If the vibration from yelling into a rack causes performance degradation, think about the vibration affects from HVAC systems, thousands of server fans, and even walking thru your data center.

Wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to yell in data centers as vibration and noise was reduced. Kind of make sense that the less noise there is the less energy is expended. If you aren't listening to the noise your hard disks aren't hard of hearing the bits and they have to try again and again.

There are actually many reasons that less is better as I have listed a bunch of ideas above.

But, the common approach in technology is more is better.

Can you shift your thinking to less is better?

It is kind of a Zen thing. Your life is not happier with more, but in understanding what you have in your life and why it is important. Meditating, reflecting, questioning.

Maybe people need to spend more time in Data Center Meditation, but it is almost impossible with all the noise and vibration.

We finally have some sunny weather here, and as you can see we have very high water as the docks are under water on June 13, 2010. It is very cool though to walk on the dock in 6 inches of water and think.

I am going to change one of my M's for memetics to meditation. So, now Monitoring, Modeling, and Meditating the green data center.