Digit asset manager Netnames said its new UK data center will save it US$1.5m a year on running costs as a result of using AMD’s SeaMicro server as its infrastructure foundation.

It claims to have built a ‘massively efficient’ hyperscale data center based on AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 server.

It said the savings will come from the machinery’s lower power consumption and personnel costs, as the systems are easier to manage and involve fewer networking layers.

The sources of the $1.5m saving will be a reduction in physical server rack space by 83%, a 99.2% server consolidation (with 500 machines being replaced by four) and a fall in ongoing operating expense by 75%, according to NetNames’ projections.

Each server has ten rack units, links 512 compute cores, has 160 gigabits of Input/Output networking and five petabytes of storage with a 1.28 terabyte high-performance supercomputing fabric, Freedom Fabric.

The density of the server eliminates the need for Top-of-Rack switches, terminal servers, hundreds of cables and thousands of components from a traditional design, according to AMD’s claims.

AMD’s SeaMicro Freedom Fabric disaggregates computing, storage and networking, which makes it easier to build computing and storage nodes to the right size for ever application, NetNames’s CIO David Jones said.

According to Jones, the company had to fundamentally rethink how a data center should be built in order to get the best flexibility and economies.

“The SM15000 server fabric the only server that provided a positive return on investment and made the project commercially viable,” Jones said.

NetNames’ the new data center will be a strategic asset that helps it extend its market leadership, Dhiraj Mallick, AMD’s general manager for Data Center Server Solutions said.

“Overcoming space and power constraints will continue to be a critical operational issue for companies. By using the SM15000 server to reimagine the data center, NetNames created enormous operational savings that was not possible with other servers.”