Intel outlines Xeon and Atom micro server plans

Intel will be releasing new Atom and Xeon chipsets designed around the needs of micro servers, a small but growing section of the market proving popular with datacentre operators and cloud  service providers.

The company has started production of the Xeon E3 range for the smaller architecture, with chips running at 45W and 20W, with a 15W Sandy Bridge processor scheduled for the second half of the year. In 2012, the company will also release a sub-10W Atom processor that has been optimised for micro servers.

"We see the opportunity for micro servers approaching 10 per cent of the whole server market," said Boyd Davis, vice president in the Intel Architecture Group.

"Our expectation is it won't get to fill the full 10 per cent because there are other technologies that service the same needs. Almost all of volume sales will come from cloud services or corporate datacentres that are beginning to mimic cloud service providers."

He described micro servers as predominantly single socket server systems that can be packed into racks and share the same power and cooling systems, to reduce the total cost of ownership. By using micro servers, as opposed to 1U rack servers, IT administrators can get four times as many servers per rack with less supporting infrastructure.

To help developers test out the capabilities of the new servers Intel will open up the Intel Micro Server Evaluation Lab by the second half of the year. This allows developers to test and optimise applications for the new platform and access instruction sets for analysis.

Gio Coglitore, director of Facebook Labs, expects to begin rolling out the new micro server systems by 2012 and will use them as part of a mesh networking system that allows for smaller user nodes and gives redundancy in case of server overload or other problems.

"There are certain loads that really benefit from the focused approach micro servers bring to the environments," he said.

"Our front end is right for micro servers as we can't visualise that very efficiently. Having a disposable server, with a low overhead that can be turned off if there's a fault is very useful."