Sponsor Profile

Energy Efficient Servers

The Gartner Group, a technology research firm, estimates that in the nearterm data centers will have to support
up to 300% increased workload. As large enterprise data center utility bills exceed $10+
million per month, the potential savings opportunities are significant with ROI payback
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 become a major concern, and governments
and private industry agree they must findways to control and reduce energy demand
while improving performance.
With these huge utility bills it is critical that
IT providers address a growing concern to:
1. Develop beneficial solutions that result insignificant power savings and increased
efficiency.
2. Maximize user ROI – making it worthwhile to implement.
Addressing the above means OpEx (operating expense) will be reduced, thus positively impacting ROI. A winning strategy is for
the IT developer to not only develop a power
efficient (Green) product line, but also add
features and capabilities to its architecturethat significantly boost overall performanceand throughput for the HPC user.

The Missing Link

A final piece of the data center green revolution is industry standardization, the missinglink. Even though data centers around theworld have integrated many sustainable bestpractices into their facilities, industry-widestandards and measurement tools are necessary to regulate and improve efficiency.
Today the Power Usage Effectiveness(PUE) ratio is the most widely accepted data
center energy-efficiency metric. The Green
Grid developed PUE, in conjunction withgovernments and private industry. PUE isdesigned to quantify the ratio between theoverall energy used divided by the IT energy
used.
PUE is a way to measure the power delivered to IT equipment in a ratio against total

power consumption in the data center. PUE= Total Facility Power / IT Equipment Power(where Total Facility Power is the power measured at the utility meter. The IT Equipment
Power is the actual load associated with allof the IT equipment including computing,storage and networking equipment).

Source: Green Grid

One company that has taken green IT toheart is Supermicro. Charles Liang, President and CEO of Supermicro, had this tosay about the Company’s Research and Development … “Today, engineers are not justdeveloping productsthat please customers,
they’re also crafting
systems that reduce
the earth’s carbon dioxide levels along withsaving customers money. Our engineers enjoy
the challenge. They are
doing something thatCharles Liang
will help customers
save money, and help our Earth—they arevery proud of this”.
Green IT has been a core value and competency of Supermicro with all products designed and engineered to lower power consumption, improve efficiency and ROI.

Supermicro —The Leader in High
Efficiency Green Computing

Supermicro is a global leader in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology
and green computing innovation. The Company develops and provides end-to-end
green computing solutions for Data Center,
Cloud Computing, Enterprise IT, HPC, Ha-doop/Big Data and Embedded Systems worldwide. Solutions include arange of complete rackmount, workstation, blade, storage, graphic processing unit systems, networking
devices and full rack solutions, aswell as subsystems, accessories, andmanagement software.
The server systems, subsystems andaccessories are architected to provide
the highest levels of reliability, quality
and scalability, thereby enabling benefits in the areas of performance, thermal management, power efficiency
and total cost of ownership. Solutions
are based on open standard components, such as Intel processors andXeon Phi coprocessors, AMD processors, and GPGPUs from NVIDIA thatare compatible with both the Linux andWindows operating systems.
Supermicro has developed thebroadest family of energy efficient
servers and associated products. Allproducts are developed with Green IT
to reduce operational costs througheffective energy use with improved
ROI, and a smaller carbon footprint.

A History of Award WinningGreen Servers

As an industry leader in power saving technology Supermicro utilizes
in-house advanced system design
expertise to reduce the power consumption of server systems. For example…
• 2006 Supermicro introduces the1U Twin™ servers featuring two
DP nodes in a 1U form factor with
89% power efficiency.
• 2007 The SuperBlade® system
built on the 1U Twin technology todevelop 93% power efficiency.

• 2008 Supermicro’s DatacenterBlade™ won Blade System Insight’s “Best Green Data CenterSolution” award for 93%+ power
supply efficiency.
• 2009 Supermicro announces theinnovative 2U Twin²™ server architecture with 4 hot-plug DP nodes
in 2U• 2010 TwinBlade™ won Blade
Systems Insight’s prestigious “BestBlade-Based Solution” award in forthe highest-performance/density
Blade solution with 94%+ power
supply efficiency.
• 2011 New servers and technologies for the HPC market were introduced, all delivering superior
performance and improved ROI.
This included a new cluster solution for Big Data and HPC (GPU)with the TwinBlade® and GPU SuperBlade® products.
• 2012 The product line was refreshed with the X9ServerSolutions
supportingIntel®
®
Xeon processor E52600/1600 together
with new platinum,high efficiency (upto 95%+) digital
switchingpower
supplies. PUE optimized servers werelaunched that sameyear together with the FatTwinTM
and new SuperServers and SuperBlade solutions supporting 16
core AMD Opteron processors.
• 2013 New Hadoop-optimized 1U,
2U Twin and 4U FatTwin™ servers
and server solutions supportingIntel’s new Xeon Phi coprocessors were introduced that cost-effectively accelerate performanceof engineering, scientific and research applications.

FatTwin Server Solution- Best TCO with Highest
Performance-per-Watt/
per-Dollar

The FatTwin is the latest addition
to Supermicro’s evolving line of Twin
Architecture SuperServer® solutions.

FatTwin with 8 DP Nodes with Front I/O

The 4U FatTwin greatly expands
compute and storage capacities toachieve increased performance withlower power consumption. By virtue
of its shared components the FatTwin
improves cost-effectiveness and reliability, while its modular architecture
makes it flexible to configure and easy
to maintain.
The FatTwin’s high efficiency, highly
effective shared cooling architecture
allows it to operate in high-temperature, free-air cooled environments up
to 47°C and up to 16% power savings, providing considerable cost savings and improved TCO.
Versatile configurations allow theFatTwin to be optimized for many different environments including Data
Center, Cloud Computing, HPC, Engineering, Research, and GPU projects/
Xeon Phi, File and Storage Server deployments, General Server and Enterprise Server applications.
FatTwin provides the highest levelsof energy efficiency and performance
representing a revolution in green
computing designed to support customers’ critical applications with reduced Data Center TCO. The FatTwin
is capable of achieving industry leading PUE of less than 1.1. This powersaving represents a $500 over the lifeof the product. If you have a 1,000
servers that is a whopping $500,000,
an impressive ROI.

Additional HPC ROI
Options with FatTwin

For HPC users the improved ROI
doesn’t end with power savings andimproved efficiency. The 4-node FatTwin platform can support up to 3 Intel
Xeon Phi Coprocessor cards per U fora total of 12 coprocessors in 4U. WithGPU/Xeon Phi™ FatTwin with 4 DP Nodesdual Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600
and up to 512GB of memory support
per node this hybrid SuperServer offers an amazing amount of parallel
processing power to accelerate research while simplifying developmentof highly-parallel applications. HPC
users that adopt this hybrid platform
will realize savings from power efficiency while accelerating engineering, enhancing scientific discovery,
and bringing new products to market
sooner. Properly utilized FatTwin canboost performance at 1/10th cost and1/20th the power consumption, thus
maximizing server ROI.

We Keep IT Green®

Supermicro leverages advanced
technology and system design expertise to reduce the power consumptionof their server, blade, workstation andstorage systems. Over many yearsof experience, they have become anindustry leader in power saving technology and green IT.
• Optimized System Architecture created to take advantage ofpower saving technology to produce optimal cooling at all application levels• Motherboards Designed With
Leading-Edge Technology andHigh-End Components to re-duce energy consumption• High-Efficiency Power Supplies designed to run at significantly higher efficiencies of up to95%+, greatly reducing energylosses• Cooling Subsystems architected for the most effective coolingof all system components• Battery Backup Power (BBP®)
Modules. Hot-swappable battery modules for integrated server
power backup in case of unexpected power outages. Eliminates
need for costly traditional UPS
systems

Supermicro at Work

The following are case studies ofongoing and successfully completed
deployments of Supermicro server
solutions:
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Scientific Research Center (USA): Large scientific researchorganizations such as LLNL require
highly optimized CPU and memoryperformance capabilities architected
as supercomputing clusters. LLNL required both cost-effective and highly
efficient computing power for theiruser community. Supermicro server
building blocks (serverboards, chassis, power supplies) were selected
for their feature rich optimization, reliability, power efficiency and price-toperformance.
CERN (Switzerland): CERN is oneof the world’s largest research labs.
CERN chose Supermicro SuperBladeservers as part of a significant upgrade for the new LHC (Large Hadron Collider) project in Geneva. Highcomputational performance, excellent
scalability, superior energy efficiency

and a competitive price/performance
ratio were key factors in the selectionprocess. CERN has gained a significant increase in computational power
while reducing the operational costs.
SoftLayer: An IBM company, is thecloud infrastructure provider of choicefor companies building for Internet
Scale. Softlayer provides global, ondemand data center and hosting services from world-class data centersin Amsterdam, Dallas, Houston, San
Jose, Seattle, Singapore, and Washington D.C., with network Points ofPresence nationwide.
Dawning (China): Dawning is one of
the largest local China server OEMs.
Dawning required high reliability, highperformance and energy efficient server building block solutions to address
the growing Chinese market. Dawning
selected the Supermicro dual processor server solutions with the highly
efficient power supplies coupled withbest price-to-performance to differentiate their product offerings in theChinese market. The result was thatDawning was able to win large server
projects in China’s rapidly growing
telecom industry.
Siemens (USA/Germany): Siemens’
medical imaging systems divisionneeded a server solution that minimized the amount of time between image capture and transmission for CT,
MRI and PET scan systems. Siemens
selected Supermicro to implement acustom serverboard architecture thatenabled the highest available I/O expansion and system bandwidth capabilities for dual processor systems. This
enabled Siemens to achieve maximum
communications throughput for their
medical imaging products and a competitive advantage in their market. n