Rising Server Maker SeaMicro Acquired By AMD

In a move to augment its cloud-system product set, Advance Micro Devices (AMD) has agreed to acquire neighbouring microserver maker SeaMicro for $334 million (£210m) – $281 million (£176m) of which is in cash.

Like AMD, SeaMicro is based in Sunnyvale, California, and has been identified by analysts and industry watchers as a rising star in the IT industry. The company uses low-power-consumption processors in its custom-designed servers that work well in private or hybrid cloud systems.

Microserver savings

SeaMicro’s small-form-factor servers use about 25 percent of the power and occupy only a sixth of the space used by conventional rack-type servers. Its servers are all plug-and-play, and they are operating-system-agnostic – requiring no reconfiguration in order to run data centre applications or a management infrastructure.

SeaMicro’s secret sauce includes its supercomputing fabric software, which can connect thousands of processor cores, memory, storage and input/output traffic for large workloads, AMD president and CEO Rory Read said. AMD will continue to support all current SeaMicro customers while accelerating plans to deliver new platforms that combine AMD and SeaMicro products and enable OEM partners to bring new packages to market, Read said.

Read said that with SeaMicro’s fabric IT and system-level design capabilities, it now will be positioned to offer server building blocks tuned for large processing workloads, such as dynamic Web content, social networking, search and video.

Read also said AMD plans to offer its first Opteron processor-based data centre packages that combine both AMD and SeaMicro IT later this year. Read also said AMD, the world’s No. 2 chip maker, remains committed to its traditional server business and will continue to invest in that sector.

SeaMicro CEO Andrew Feldman will become general manager of AMD’s newly created Data Centre Server Solutions business. SeaMicro had received $35 million (£22m) in venture funding in the last three years from Kosla Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

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