SeaMicro

SeaMicro was established in 2007 by Andrew Feldman, Gary Lauterbach, and Anil Rao to address the growing power consumption and space constraints in data centers. Feldman, who served as CEO, had prior experience in marketing and product management at networking companies. He co-founded the company with Lauterbach and Rao, who had the technical vision for creating a computer that used substantially less power for each computation. The company secured Series A funding in December 2007 and a Series B round in 2009, with investors including Crosslink Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Khosla Ventures. A significant milestone was receiving a $9.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2009 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The firm specialized in developing high-density, low-power microservers for the scale-out data center market, targeting clients with large-scale infrastructures like those in web services, online gaming, and search computation. SeaMicro's business model revolved around selling these server systems directly to large data center operators and through OEM partners. The company's core innovation was a new server architecture that reportedly used one-quarter of the power and occupied one-quarter of the space compared to traditional servers. This was achieved through a combination of using a large number of low-power processors, initially Intel Atom CPUs, and a custom ASIC that virtualized I/O functions. This design dramatically reduced the number of components, cables, and power draw typically found in server racks.

SeaMicro's flagship product line, including the SM10000 and the later SM15000 models, was built around its proprietary "Freedom Fabric" technology. This supercompute fabric acted as a high-bandwidth, 3D torus interconnect that linked hundreds of processor cores, memory, and storage into a single, cohesive system with an aggregate throughput of up to 1.28 Tb/s. This design eliminated the need for conventional top-of-rack switches and complex cabling, simplifying the data center environment. The servers were designed to be plug-and-play, requiring no changes to existing operating systems or applications. Later iterations supported a variety of processors, including Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron chips, and could be configured with up to five petabytes of storage. In February 2012, AMD announced its acquisition of SeaMicro for approximately $334 million, integrating the company as its Data Center Server Solutions business. However, AMD ceased SeaMicro's operations on April 16, 2015.

Keywords: microservers, data center efficiency, low-power servers, Freedom Fabric, high-density servers, Andrew Feldman, server architecture, scale-out infrastructure, AMD acquisition, supercompute fabric, virtualized I/O, SM15000, energy-efficient computing, data center hardware, cloud servers, HPC, compute density, rack storage, server virtualization, ASIC design, network fabric