Xyratex, the UK data storage house that spun out of IBM in a management buy-out 20 years ago, is now a strategic supplier to AMD, which picked the Brit's OneStor Modular Enclosure as a building block for its Big Data and storage-intensive solutions.

The Xyratex widgetry has been optimized for AMD's SeaMicro SM1500 microserver, which will provide more than 5PT of storage capacity in two racks for Big Data applications such as Hadoop and object storage.

The combination of Xyratex and SeaMicro is meant to deliver an ultra-dense, high-performance platform that eliminates excess hardware costs and cabling while simplifying installation and minimizing footprint requirements. AMD believes it will offer unmatched storage density and capacity.

Xyratex says its OneStor family of data storage systems offers a series of storage building blocks that can be deployed in various ways to accommodate the most demanding storage requirements. These next-generation storage solutions consolidate server storage requirements into a single storage computing platform for more integrated, powerful and intelligent solutions.

The tight integration of the SM15000 server and Xyratex storage is supposed to boost performance, make deployment easier, simplify management and lower operating costs.

AMD's x86-based SeaMicro SM15000 system is supposed to be the highest-density, most energy-efficient server in the market. In 10 rack units, it links 512 compute cores - either Opterons or Xeons - 160 gigabits of I/O networking and more than 5PT of storage through SeaMicro's 1.28 terabyte high-performance supercomputer-style Freedom Fabric. The SM15000 server eliminates top-of-rack switches, terminal servers, hundreds of cables and thousands of unnecessary components for a more efficient and simple operational environment.

Its approach is said to deliver the benefits of expensive and complex solutions such as Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Networking (SAN) with the simplicity and low cost of direct attached storage.