A new breed of server company is targeting customers unsatisfied with the processing power of x86 system clusters and unwilling to pay steep prices for current proprietary symmetric multiprocessing boxes.

Two of these start-ups, Fabric7 Systems and Liquid Computing, have rolled out multiprocessor servers built on AMD Opteron chips that promise high-end compute power at prices lower than those HP, IBM and Sun usually charge for SMP boxes. In addition, the systems include network components that enable end users to allocate not just CPU but also I/O and bandwidth resources on the fly to satisfy changing application demand.

It's an idea similar to that used by developers of standards-based blade servers and rack-based server clusters, which use high-speed interconnects to enable workloads to be shared across systems. But Fabric7 and Liquid Computing, whose founders worked at such network companies as Nortel and Procket Networks, take the clustering idea a step further by including virtualization and network capabilities within a single SMP box.

"The real trick here is marrying the interconnect strength with commodity or off-the-shelf processors, operating systems and middleware," says Jonathan Eunice, president and principal analyst at Illuminata. "We're talking Windows; we're talking Linux. It's standard middleware. It's not a specialized design that needs huge amounts of customization of the whole software stack."

Armed with about $45 million in venture funding between them, Fabric7 and Liquid Computing are targeting different markets: The former positions its systems as the answer for enterprise IT administrators battling with underutilized, proprietary midrange servers, while the latter is eyeing the high-performance computing segment looking for unbounded compute power.

But their approach - combining Opteron processors and advanced network features - is similar, and one that analysts expect to see more of as enterprises more widely embrace the idea of data center virtualization.

Roger Carpenter, vice president of design at Magma Design Automation in Santa Clara, Calif., which makes software for chip design, has been testing Fabric7's Q160 since earlier this year and brought in a smaller Q80 about a month ago. Carpenter says he likes Fabric7's approach because it will enable him to get the processing power he needs without spending a lot of money on high-end systems.  A 16-way Fabric7 Q80 with dual-core 1.8-GHz Opteron processors, 32G bytes of memory and two 73G-byte disk drives starts around $83,000, whereas IBM's Web site lists a 16-way p570 with dual-core 1.65-GHz Power5 processors, 32G bytes of memory and two 73G-byte disk drives as starting at around $219,000.

"Much of [electronic design automation] software used very expensive multiprocessing systems in the past," he says. "The trend lately has been toward Linux and two-way Linux boxes."

But now multithreaded EDA applications are demanding more memory and bigger multiprocessor systems at different points in the design process, Carpenter says.