Supermicro unveils Intel Atom-powered servers

Some things don’t go well together like cats and dogs or Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld. Put them in the same room and bad things happen, the couch gets peed on, a CEO goes crazy and drops $10 million on an ad campaign that universally provokes a "WTF" response; you get the idea. Two more things that I thought were on the list of things that don’t go together are Intel Atom netbook processors and servers.

Servers are usually powerful and power hungry computers with loads of grunt that handle high-performance tasks like serving web pages and essential business applications. Servers are also needed for applications that don’t need high-performance, but do need low power requirements.


_{Above: Supermicro Atom-based Server}

To meet the needs of that last group of applications Supermicro has announced a pair of new servers that are based on the Intel Atom processor. The tiny Supermicro 5015A SuperServers are highly power efficient and come in two flavors needing under 9-watts of power. One variety uses the single-core Intel Atom 230 CPU and needs a mere 4W of power. The server offers support for multiple RAID levels, four SATA ports, seven USB headers, 2GB of DDR2 RAM and Intel GMA 950 graphics among other features.

The more power hungry of the pair of servers uses the Intel Atom dual-core 330 CPU slurping down a still tiny 8-watts of power. Both of the servers offer similar specifications and can handle a pair of internal drives, full height, half-length expansion cards and use no fans. The servers are also physically small at 9.8-inches deep and weighing ten pounds. Supermicro says that the machines are aimed at email and print server needs, but we can also see a use in home security -- such low power consumption would make these servers ideal for running software that logs home IP cameras and does basic motion detection and so on.

Pricing and availability is unknown. SuperMicro servers are sold in Australia through a number of smaller retailers including Compucon.