Volume servers consume more than 1% of the total electricity used in the United States—More than $3 Billion dollars each year. Over the last six years, the power consumed by volume servers more than doubled. For companies in the data center, power consumption is the largest Operating Expense for often accounting for more than 30% of Op EX.  In fact, research has shown that over a volume server’s lifetime the cost of power exceeds its purchase price.

SeaMicro has identified the primary drivers underlying the power inefficiencies in volume servers and has systematically rectified these shortcomings. The result is a small form factor server that uses one-quarter of the power and requires only one-quarter of the space used for traditional servers. SeaMicro servers are plug and play—they require no changes to software operating systems, applications, or management infrastructure.

Over the past 10 years, the data center has undergone a sea change in size and scope, including dramatic changes in the demand for compute, the type of compute required, and  the economics of operation. Scale out replaced scale up, and the Cloud became the home of many business services and a source of on-demand compute. Despite these changes, the server has remained architecturally unchanged. Server manufacturers made no accommodation for the new and different workloads and traffic patterns despite the highly specialized workloads that rose to dominance in the data center. This mismatch between specialized workloads and generalist servers is an underlying cause of the power consumption issue in the data center.

SeaMicro saw this opportunity, but unlike previous approaches to reducing power draw in servers, did not focus on redesigning power supplies or improving airflow. Instead, SeaMicro brought together technical insights from CPU design, virtualization, supercomputing and networking to create a new server architecture optimized for scale-out infrastructures. SeaMicro characterized the specific computational requirements of scale-out work in data centers and designed custom hardware, ASICs and FPGAs, and selected CPUs optimized for scale-out workloads to create the industry's first purpose-built server optimized for highly partitioned workloads such as those found in the web tier, search, and index computation.

SeaMicro was founded by industry veterans who have helped build some of the world’s largest data centers. The founders have brought together a deep understanding of data center computation including CPU architecture, Clustering, Networking and Interconnect Technologies. SeaMicro is backed by leading venture capitalists including Khosla Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Crosslink Capital, as well as leading public corporations. SeaMicro was also recently recognized as an industry pioneer by the Department of Energy who awarded SeaMicro one of the largest Department of Energy Grants made in all of the Telecommunication and Data communication industries.

Please send inquiries to info@seamicro.com and resumes to resume@seamicro.com.