Penguin Demos Atom Powered Microserver 

Penguin Computing recently debuted their newest integrated SoC design that Penguins says was built with Facebook’s Open Compute Project at the fore.

The heart of the new microsever’s design is Intel’s 64-bit Atom processor C2000 product family, which boasts up to eight cores and up to 32GB of 1600 MHz of DDR3L RAM – all while consuming a gaunt power intake as low as 6 watts. The new microserver, says Penguin, is ideal of I/O bound scale out workloads such as low end web hosting, simple content delivery and ultra low-end web servers.

“The C2000 platform is very interesting because it addresses that power concern,” says Phillip Pokorny, Chief Technical Officer for Penguin Computing. “It’s a completely integrated system on a chip which helps reduce the amount of power used and improves the efficiency – we get more high performance compute cycles done, we get more web pages served for a given power density, and we can integrate everything into a small 3x5 sized card.”

Penguin is eager to point out that their new microserver cards (not to mention the actual microserver system itself) are vanity free designs that comply with the Open Compute project, initiated by Facebook in 2011. The goal of the project is to build low cost, highly efficient computing infrastructures using models and methods that are traditionally associated with open source software projects. “We believe that openly sharing ideas, specifications and other intellectual property is the key to maximizing innovation and reducing operational complexity in the scalable computing space,” says the group in their charter.

The new Penguin microserver platform falls right into the Open Compute breadbasket with a modular architecture that allows for right-sizing compute capacity by populating each chassis with the right number of microserver cards required to accommodate a specific workload.

With the new platform, says Pokorny, “we can leverage that small form factor in a standards kind of way that allows customers to design the best system to meet their needs, and for us to deliver those systems to those customers in a completely integrated rack.”

A spokesperson for Penguin told us that the new microserver will be available in Q1 of 2014. Pricing has not yet been released.