AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that the SeaMicro SM15000™ server supports bare metal features in OpenStack® Compute.  AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 server is ideally suited for massive OpenStack deployments by integrating compute, storage and networking into a 10 rack unit system. The system is built around the Freedom™ fabric, the industry’s premier supercomputing fabric for scale out data center applications. The Freedom fabric disaggregates compute, storage and network I/O to provide the most flexible, saleable and resilient data center infrastructure in the industry.  This allows customers to match the compute performance, storage capacity and networking I/O to their application needs.  The result is an adaptive data center where any server can be mapped to any hard disk/SSD or network I/O to expand capacity or recover from a component failure.

“OpenStack Compute’s bare metal capabilities provide the scalability and flexibility to build and manage large-scale public and private clouds with virtualized and dedicated servers,” said Dhiraj Mallick, corporate vice president and general manager, Data Center Server Solutions, at AMD. “The SeaMicro SM15000 server’s bare metal provisioning capabilities should simplify enterprise adoption of OpenStack and accelerate mass deployments since not all work loads are optimized for virtualized environments.”

Bare metal computing provides more predictable performance than a shared server environment using virtual servers.  In a bare metal environment there are no delays caused by different virtual machines contending for shared resources, since the entire server’s resources are dedicated to a single user instance.  In addition, in a bare metal environment the performance penalty imposed by the hypervisor is eliminated, allowing the application software to make full use of the processor’s capabilities 

In addition to leading in bare metal provisioning, AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 server provides the ability to boot and install a base server image from a central server for massive OpenStack deployments.  A cloud image containing the KVM, the OpenStack Compute image and other applications can be configured by the central server.  The coordination and scheduling of this workflow can be managed by Heat, the orchestration application that manages the entire lifecycle of an OpenStack cloud for bare metal and virtual machines.

AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 Server

AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 system is the highest-density, most energy-efficient server in the market. In 10 rack units, it links 512 compute cores, 160 gigabits of I/O networking, more than five petabytes of storage with a 1.28 terabyte high-performance supercompute fabric, called Freedom™ fabric. The SM15000 server eliminates top-of-rack switches, terminal servers, hundreds of cables and thousands of unnecessary components for a more efficient and simple operational environment.

AMD’s SeaMicro server product family currently supports the next-generation AMD Opteron™ (“Piledriver” core) processor, Intel® Xeon® E3-1260L (“Sandy Bridge”), E3-1265Lv2  (“Ivy Bridge”), E3-1265Lv3  (“Haswell”) and Intel® Atom™ N570 processors. The AMD SeaMicro SM15000 also supports the Freedom Fabric Storage products, enabling a single system to connect with more than five petabytes of storage capacity in two racks. This approach delivers the benefits of expensive and complex solutions such as network attached storage (NAS) and storage area networking (SAN) with the simplicity and low cost of direct attached storage.