Supermicro Launches Intel Atom-based Servers

[Rob Williams]

From our front-page news:

Because we at Techgage cover desktop computing so heavily, it's easy to overlook the server side of things, which arguably, is just as large as desktop computing, if not larger. At the base of any company, large or small, there's likely one server, or a thousand, or tens of thousands. What that means for larger companies are unbelievable power bills, and it's no surprise... the computing power is huge.

Not all servers have got to be powerful enough to launch rockets, though. Take the latest offering from Supermicro, which instead of featuring the beefiest CPUs around, includes Intel's basic Atom processors. I've heard in the past that Atom actually serves as a good base for a simple server, and a release like this from one of the largest server providers pretty much confirms that.

Supermicro's more basic offering includes the single-core Atom 230, although a Dual-Core version is also available. The rackmount is smaller than 1U, with a depth of 9.8", and given the overall power consumption and thermal output, cooling would be rather quiet, as opposed to much larger servers. I have to admit, I absolutely love products like this. If more people used servers like this where applicable, the power saved would be immense... not only from the servers themselves, but from the cooling required to keep them operational.

Optimized for the single-core Atom 230 processor, which consumes only 4 watts of power, Supermicro's cost-effective X7SLA-L platform supports up to four SATA ports with RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10, along with seven USB 2.0 headers, 2 GB DDR2 memory, Intel GMA 950 graphics and a Gigabit Ethernet port. For more performance-intensive applications, the high-end X7SLA-H integrates the dual-core Atom 330 processor, which consumes 8 watts of power and expands upon the features of the X7SLA-L with dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, an additional onboard Type A USB 2.0 connector and an extra internal serial port.

Source: Supermicro, Via: TG Daily
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[Kougar]

I'd like to know what the market for this thing is. I can understand not needing tons of CPU power, most servers tend to hardly use the CPU... but there's no GPU, single NIC, and just a basic laptop drive for the base model. There isn't a single one specific task the box could excel at.

I'd seriously wonder if the drive controller could fully utilize an expensive 15K RPM drive or SSD upgrade.. most laptops with current chipsets are only able to operate at SATA 150Ggb/s rates. It's also more power efficient to build a single large wattage PSU than a dozen tiny 200W units since TG Daily mentioned it might work in quantity, not quality situations....

 

[Rob Williams]

The market could be anything simple... such as an e-mail server. It's unwise to throw your e-mail onto a server that takes care of other things, so most people put it on a dedicated machine. Thing is... it's just e-mail, and if there's a low overall volume, then a regular desktop PC would needlessly be drawing more power than is required.

Really, that's the main example I can think of, although I'm sure there are many other scenarios where it would work.

 

[Kougar]

I'm still not convinced this Atom server is not more than a nich market yet... email overhead is generally very minor and wouldn't cause problems on dedicated business servers unless this was some huge organization, email hosting hub, or they simply were already fully loading their servers for other purposes. In which case this machine would need a high-end SSD to deliver the I/O, random reads, and general disk throughput required for a large email server. They took a single-core Atom and basically released a Nettop in server form-factor.

Now this is what I would more expect, and because Nano is a more powerful CPU I think it has merit. Especially as just one PSU + a redundant PSU could be used for the whole box. This would be much more power efficient than any kind of 1U server rack using Atom with each server running it's own underutilized 200W PSU. http://techreport.com/discussions.x/16940

 

[Rob Williams]

I agree, Nano is a perfect fit for something like this. I also agree on this being an extreme niche product right now, but I do hope we see more uses for such servers. The power draw differences between even a dual-core Xeon machine and the Atom or Nano rig is stark, and if one company managed to replace a lot of their regular servers with these, then the savings would be enormous.

I still fail to come up with a scenario other than e-mail though. For any type of server, you do want some real power to handle whatever it's set out to do. Servers are not supposed to lag with a given task.