Sponsor Profile

Energy Efficient Servers

he Gartner Group, a technology re- power consumption in the data center. PUE search firm, estimates that in the near- = Total Facility Power / IT Equipment Power T term data centers will have to support (where Total Facility Power is the power mea- up to 300% increased workload. As large en- sured at the utility meter. The IT Equipment terprise data center utility bills exceed $10+ Power is the actual load associated with all million per month, the potential savings op- of the IT equipment including computing, portunities are significant with ROI payback storage and networking equipment). periods of less than two years. Data centers are estimated to consume 2% of the U.S. electrical grid capacity resulting in $2 billion per month in utility bills. The cost of energy for these power-hungry IT systems has be- come a major concern, and governments and private industry agree they must find ways to control and reduce energy demand while improving performance. With these huge utility bills it is critical that Source: Green Grid IT providers address a growing concern to: 1. Develop beneficial solutions that result in One company that has taken green IT to significant power savings and increased heart is Supermicro. Charles Liang, Presi- efficiency. dent and CEO of Supermicro, had this to 2. Maximize user ROI – making it worth- say about the Company’s Research and De- while to implement. velopment … “Today, engineers are not just Addressing the above means OpEx (op- developing products erating expense) will be reduced, thus posi- that please customers, tively impacting ROI. A winning strategy is for they’re also crafting the IT developer to not only develop a power systems that reduce efficient (Green) product line, but also add the earth’s carbon di- features and capabilities to its architecture oxide levels along with that significantly boost overall performance saving customers mon- and throughput for the HPC user. ey. Our engineers enjoy the challenge. They are doing something that The Missing Link Charles Liang A final piece of the data center green revo- will help customers lution is industry standardization, the missing save money, and help our Earth—they are link. Even though data centers around the very proud of this”. world have integrated many sustainable best Green IT has been a core value and com- practices into their facilities, industry-wide petency of Supermicro with all products de- standards and measurement tools are nec- signed and engineered to lower power con- essary to regulate and improve efficiency. sumption, improve efficiency and ROI. Today the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratio is the most widely accepted data Supermicro — center energy-efficiency metric. The Green The Leader in High Grid developed PUE, in conjunction with Efficiency Green Computing governments and private industry. PUE is Supermicro is a global leader in high-per- designed to quantify the ratio between the formance, high-efficiency server technology overall energy used divided by the IT energy and green computing innovation. The Com- used. pany develops and provides end-to-end PUE is a way to measure the power deliv- green computing solutions for Data Center, ered to IT equipment in a ratio against total Cloud Computing, Enterprise IT, HPC, Ha- doop/Big Data and Embedded Sys- • 2008 Supermicro’s Datacenter- tems worldwide. Solutions include a Blade™ won Blade System In- range of complete rackmount, work- sight’s “Best Green Data Center station, blade, storage, graphic pro- Solution” award for 93%+ power cessing unit systems, networking supply efficiency. devices and full rack solutions, as • 2009 Supermicro announces the well as subsystems, accessories, and innovative 2U Twin²™ server archi- management software. tecture with 4 hot-plug DP nodes The server systems, subsystems and in 2U FatTwin with 8 DP Nodes with Front I/O accessories are architected to provide • 2010 TwinBlade™ won Blade the highest levels of reliability, quality Systems Insight’s prestigious “Best and scalability, thereby enabling ben- Blade-Based Solution” award in for The 4U FatTwin greatly expands efits in the areas of performance, ther- the highest-performance/density compute and storage capacities to mal management, power efficiency Blade solution with 94%+ power achieve increased performance with and total cost of ownership. Solutions supply efficiency. lower power consumption. By virtue are based on open standard compo- • 2011 New servers and technolo- of its shared components the FatTwin nents, such as Intel processors and gies for the HPC market were in- improves cost-effectiveness and reli- Xeon Phi coprocessors, AMD proces- troduced, all delivering superior ability, while its modular architecture sors, and GPGPUs from NVIDIA that performance and improved ROI. makes it flexible to configure and easy are compatible with both the Linux and This included a new cluster solu- to maintain. Windows operating systems. tion for Big Data and HPC (GPU) The FatTwin’s high efficiency, highly Supermicro has developed the with the TwinBlade® and GPU Su- effective shared cooling architecture broadest family of energy efficient perBlade® products. allows it to operate in high-tempera- servers and associated products. All • 2012 The product line was re- ture, free-air cooled environments up freshed with the X9 to 47°C and up to 16% power sav- Server Solutions ings, providing considerable cost sav- supporting Intel® ings and improved TCO. Xeon® processor E5- Versatile configurations allow the 2600/1600 together FatTwin to be optimized for many dif- with new platinum, ferent environments including Data high efficiency (up Center, Cloud Computing, HPC, Engi- to 95%+) digital neering, Research, and GPU projects/ switching power Xeon Phi, File and Storage Server de- supplies. PUE opti- ployments, General Server and Enter- mized servers were prise Server applications. launched that same FatTwin provides the highest levels products are developed with Green IT year together with the FatTwinTM of energy efficiency and performance to reduce operational costs through and new SuperServers and Su- representing a revolution in green effective energy use with improved perBlade solutions supporting 16 computing designed to support cus- ROI, and a smaller carbon footprint. core AMD Opteron processors. tomers’ critical applications with re- • 2013 New Hadoop-optimized 1U, duced Data Center TCO. The FatTwin A History of Award Winning 2U Twin and 4U FatTwin™ servers is capable of achieving industry lead- Green Servers and server solutions supporting ing PUE of less than 1.1. This power As an industry leader in power sav- Intel’s new Xeon Phi coproces- saving represents a $500 over the life ing technology Supermicro utilizes sors were introduced that cost-ef- of the product. If you have a 1,000 in-house advanced system design fectively accelerate performance servers that is a whopping $500,000, expertise to reduce the power con- of engineering, scientific and re- an impressive ROI. sumption of server systems. For ex- search applications. ample… Additional HPC ROI • 2006 Supermicro introduces the FatTwin Server Solution Options with FatTwin 1U Twin™ servers featuring two - Best TCO with Highest For HPC users the improved ROI DP nodes in a 1U form factor with Performance-per-Watt/ doesn’t end with power savings and 89% power efficiency. per-Dollar improved efficiency. The 4-node Fat- • 2007 The SuperBlade® system The FatTwin is the latest addition Twin platform can support up to 3 Intel built on the 1U Twin technology to to Supermicro’s evolving line of Twin Xeon Phi Coprocessor cards per U for develop 93% power efficiency. Architecture SuperServer® solutions. a total of 12 coprocessors in 4U. With duce energy consumption and a competitive price/performance • High-Efficiency Power Sup- ratio were key factors in the selection plies designed to run at signifi- process. CERN has gained a signifi- cantly higher efficiencies of up to cant increase in computational power 95%+, greatly reducing energy while reducing the operational costs. losses SoftLayer: An IBM company, is the • Cooling Subsystems architect- cloud infrastructure provider of choice ed for the most effective cooling for companies building for Internet of all system components Scale. Softlayer provides global, on- GPU/Xeon Phi™ FatTwin with 4 DP Nodes • Battery Backup Power (BBP®) demand data center and hosting ser- Modules. Hot-swappable bat- vices from world-class data centers dual Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 tery modules for integrated server in Amsterdam, Dallas, Houston, San and up to 512GB of memory support power backup in case of unex- Jose, Seattle, Singapore, and Wash- per node this hybrid SuperServer of- pected power outages. Eliminates ington D.C., with network Points of fers an amazing amount of parallel need for costly traditional UPS Presence nationwide. processing power to accelerate re- systems Dawning (China): Dawning is one of search while simplifying development the largest local China server OEMs. of highly-parallel applications. HPC Supermicro at Work Dawning required high reliability, high users that adopt this hybrid platform The following are case studies of performance and energy efficient serv- will realize savings from power effi- ongoing and successfully completed er building block solutions to address ciency while accelerating engineer- deployments of Supermicro server the growing Chinese market. Dawning ing, enhancing scientific discovery, solutions: selected the Supermicro dual proces- and bringing new products to market Lawrence Livermore National Labo- sor server solutions with the highly sooner. Properly utilized FatTwin can ratory (LLNL) Scientific Research Cen- efficient power supplies coupled with boost performance at 1/10th cost and ter (USA): Large scientific research best price-to-performance to differ- 1/20th the power consumption, thus organizations such as LLNL require entiate their product offerings in the maximizing server ROI. highly optimized CPU and memory Chinese market. The result was that performance capabilities architected Dawning was able to win large server We Keep IT Green® as supercomputing clusters. LLNL re- projects in China’s rapidly growing Supermicro leverages advanced quired both cost-effective and highly telecom industry. technology and system design exper- efficient computing power for their Siemens (USA/Germany): Siemens’ tise to reduce the power consumption user community. Supermicro server medical imaging systems division of their server, blade, workstation and building blocks (serverboards, chas- needed a server solution that mini- storage systems. Over many years sis, power supplies) were selected mized the amount of time between im- of experience, they have become an for their feature rich optimization, reli- age capture and transmission for CT, industry leader in power saving tech- ability, power efficiency and price-to- MRI and PET scan systems. Siemens nology and green IT. performance. selected Supermicro to implement a • Optimized System Architec- CERN (Switzerland): CERN is one custom serverboard architecture that ture created to take advantage of of the world’s largest research labs. enabled the highest available I/O ex- power saving technology to pro- CERN chose Supermicro SuperBlade pansion and system bandwidth capa- duce optimal cooling at all appli- servers as part of a significant up- bilities for dual processor systems. This cation levels grade for the new LHC (Large Had- enabled Siemens to achieve maximum • Motherboards Designed With ron Collider) project in Geneva. High communications throughput for their Leading-Edge Technology and computational performance, excellent medical imaging products and a com- High-End Components to re- scalability, superior energy efficiency petitive advantage in their market. n