Rackable puts desktop CPUs in low-cost servers

Rackable Systems has turned to low-cost desktop components for a new server design that aims to provide a cheaper alternative for companies running busy Web applications, the company announced Wednesday.

The design uses Athlon and Phenom desktop CPUs from Advanced Micro Devices and allows for highly dense servers that can be priced under US$500 because they are based on commodity PC parts, said Saeed Atashie, director of server products at Rackable.

The servers use AMD's small form-factor MiniITX and MiniATX motherboards to cram as much processing power as possible into each system. They can house up to 264 compute nodes per cabinet and draw as little as 72 watts per node, using a new server design that Rackable calls MicroSlice.

The idea is to provide a simple, low-cost system that includes only the components needed to run busy Web applications, such as an e-commerce or social networking site, Atashie said. Most entry-level servers today start at $1,000 or more, though they include more powerful processors and other advanced features.

Rackable released four servers Wednesday based on the new design. They lack some of the management features found in more traditional servers, such as Remote KVM, and come with a maximum of 8GB of main memory, so they're not suitable for large database or enterprise resource planning applications.

But Rackable says their energy- and cost-efficiency make them highly suitable for cloud computing applications that scale well over a high number of server nodes. Based on internal tests it claims to offer a 51 percent improvement in price/performance running an Apache Web server benchmark compared with a more traditional rackmount server, though those figures have not been verified independently.

Future products will have more management features, Atashie said, and the company plans to announce MicroSlice servers later this quarter based on Intel CPUs, according to a slide in its presentation.

Rackable is marketing the servers as "a hardware-based approach to virtualization" that it calls "physicalization."

"Instead of paying for third-party software to break larger machines into smaller chunks, or virtual machines, we take a larger machine and divide it into much smaller physical nodes that are independent and can each be dedicated to a particular application," Atashie said.

"The benefits we're seeking are more cost-effective scaling, because the individual nodes are more granular and can grow in lower-cost chunks, and a compelling improvement in price/performance and performance per watt."

Mark Peters, a server analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, said the "physicalization" marketing pitch may not be very helpful. "It's one of those cases where it's being dressed up as something fancy when in fact the basic idea is very simple," he said.

"I like what they are doing," he added. "They're taking small, standard building blocks and letting you create them into the type of system you want."

The biggest challenge for Rackable will be convincing companies to try out a brand new server architecture, Peters said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.