Egenera Picks Micron Aspen Memory Modules to Enhance BladeFrame Platform

Micron Technology (News - Alert) is incorporating its line of energy-efficient Aspen Memory products into the BladFrame platform from Egenera. The purpose of the integration is to reduce data center power consumption.

 

Micron’s 1 Gb-based 1.5-volt DDR2 modules combined with Egenera’s platform reduces server memory power consumption by up to 17 percent.

 

Solutions that enable more energy-efficient data center servers are seeing increased demand because of growing energy costs and scrutiny regarding pollution that results from energy production.

 

One way data center operations can reduce power consumption is by implementing virtualization software, which reduces the overall number of physical servers located in each data center. On the other hand, virtualization puts more pressure on the remaining hardware technology and memory. This can limit the number of virtual environments run on a single hardware platform.

 

“Everything runs better with more memory,” said senior product manager of Egenera Dick Csaplar. “But as we add more memory to our systems for increased performance, power consumption rises. This is why we looked to take advantage of Micron’s low-voltage Aspen Memory products.”

 

The BladeFrame system makes use of the Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture from Egenera, combining stateless, diskless Processing Blade (pBlade) modules with the Egenera PAN Manager virtualization software. This reduces data center complexity with the “agile, highly-available infrastructure.”

 

In contrast to other bladed servers, pBlade modules only contain processors and memory, which gives customers the ability to build flexible, scalable environments. In order to minimize power consumption, Egenera combined Micron’s low-voltage 1 Gb-based DDR2 Aspen Memory modules with its two-processor pBlade module configurations using Intel (News - Alert) Xeon x86 microprocessor technology. The pBlade module memory configurations can range from 4 GB to 96 GBs in a 1U configuration.

 

“We are currently going through the process of migrating all of our FB-DIMM-based server blades to Micron’s low-power memory, making it a standard offering in all of our systems,” stated Csaplar.

 

It is estimated that memory-related applications currently consume roughly 15 percent of power in data center server systems. The implementation of Micron’s Aspen Memory products enables data centers to reduce memory power consumption by up to 60 percent. By using Micron’s Aspen Memory energy-efficient memory modules, server manufacturers can select a memory solution that best meets their design requirements for anything from low-voltage mainstream DDR2 memory to next-generation DDR3 memory.