AMD Partners with HP to Improve Virtualization, Cloud Data Center Offerings

AMD has decided to consolidate its data centers offering by partnering with its longtime partner Hewlett-Packard. HP will help cut the infrastructure of AMD, while increasing network capacity and performance.

The first step is to reduce the number of data centers. AMD currently has twelve data centers down from eighteen in 2009. The company plans to reduce it further to three by 2014, of which one is from Asia and two will be in North America.

The company also trying to consolidate others networks products including servers, and network latency so engineers can get higher utilization rates and quicker access to servers.

“We want to do compute anywhere — it doesn’t matter where the engineer sits as long as they get the performance they need,” said Farid Dana, director, IT, Global Infrastructure Services, AMD.

AMD’s next step is to optimize resources while improving the efficiency of energy consumption and cooling. For this reason, AMD has chosen HP’s agile networking solutions to consolidate and standardize its global data centers.

The provider of computing and graphics technologies aims to create a new private cloud data center with HP’s Critical Facilities Services (CFS). The team at HP CFS offers consulting services, architecture and assurance for building new data centers or redesign legacy environments. AMD designed the data center from the beginning by working with CFS team to meet constantly evolving business requirements, with lower capital and operating costs.

AMD will use HP 12500 Switch Series and HP 5820 Switch Series in its newest private cloud data center. The switches are ideal for AMD’s heavy use of cluster and virtualization technologies.

“We were experiencing suboptimal business operations due to infrastructure sprawl,” said Dana. “HP Networking’s open, standards-based architecture offered us the flexibility to easily integrate solutions and expand our infrastructure while leveraging existing investments.”

AMD also plans to deploy HP ProLiant BL465c G7 servers with AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors to improve computing power of private cloud, which performs up to 40 million engineering simulations per month. The server platform will support AMD’s business applications and services as well as the company’s virtualized environments.

By adopting HP networking solutions and new server technologies, AMD will be able to reduce the environmental impact of datacenter by more than 50 percent and increase the network capacity and improve data center performance. The company will upgrade other data center sites with HP networking solutions in the near future.