by Timothy Prickett Morgan, The Register
Earlier this week, ahead of the kickoff of the Intel Developer Forum, cheeky AMD launched its next generation of microservers sporting both Intel and AMD chips and a revamped SM15000 chassis that links storage arrays directly into the system “Freedom” interconnect fabric at the heart of the SeaMicro system it acquired earlier this year.

So how good is this interconnect at supporting storage, and how does it stack up running big-data jobs against traditional x86 clusters and storage?

“For the server community, storage was an afterthought,” explained Andrew Feldman, cofounder of SeaMicro and now general manager of AMD’s Data Center Solutions Group that has coalesced around the $334m acquisition of SeaMicro from earlier this year. “We just hung as many disks as we could off the server. We built servers that did not have any flexibility in their compute-to-storage ratio and that could not fully utilize disks.”

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