How can your customers make room for AI in data centers that are already full?
It’s a question that’s far from academic. Nine in 10 tech vendors surveyed recently by the Uptime Institute expect AI to be widely used in data centers in the next 5 years.
Yet data center space is both hard to find and costly to rent. Vacancy rates have hit new lows, according to real-estate services firm CBRE Group.
Worse, this combination of supply shortages and high demand is driving up data center pricing and rents. Across North America, CRBE says, pricing is up by 20% year-on-year.
Getting enough electric power is an issue, too. Some utilities have told prospective data-center customers they won’t get the power they requested until the next decade, reports The Wall Street Journal. In other cases, strapped utilities are simply giving customers less power than they asked for.
So how to help your customers get their data centers ready for AI? AMD has some answers. And a free software tool to help.
The AMD Solution
AMD’s solution is simple, with just 2 points:
- Make the most of existing data-center real estate and power by consolidating existing workloads.
- Replace the low-density compute of older, inefficient and out-of-warranty systems with compute that’s newer, denser and more efficient.
AMD is making the case that your customers can do both by moving from older Intel-based systems to newer ones that are AMD-based.
For example, the company says, replacing servers based on Intel Xeon 6143 Sky Lake processors with those based on AMD EPYC 9334 CPUs can result in the need for 73% fewer servers, 70% fewer racks and 69% less power.
That could include Supermicro servers powered by AMD EPYC processors. Supermicro H13 servers using AMD EPYC 9004 Series processors offer capabilities for high-performance data centers.
AMD hasn’t yet done comparisons with either its new 5th gen EPYC processors (introduced last week) or Intel’s 86xx CPUs. But the company says the results should be similar.
Consolidating processor-based servers can also make room in your customers’ racks for AMD Instinct MI300 Series accelerators designed specifically for AI and HPC workloads.
For example, if your customer has older servers based on Intel Xeon Cascade Lake processors, migrating them to servers based on AMD EPYC 9754 processors instead can gain them as much as a 5-to-1 consolidation.
The result? Enough power and room to accommodate a new AI platform.
Questions Answered
Simple doesn’t always mean easy. And you and your customers may have concerns.
For example, isn’t switching from one vendor to another difficult?
No, says AMD. The company cross-licenses the X86 instruction set, so on its processors, most workloads and applications will just work.
What about all those cores on AMD processors? Won’t they raise a customer’s failure domain too high?
No, says AMD. Its CPUs are scalable enough to handle any failure domain from 8 to 256 cores per server.
Wouldn’t moving require a cold migration? And if so, wouldn’t that disrupt the customer’s business?
Again, AMD says no. While moving virtual machines (VMs) to a new architecture does require a cold migration, the job can be done without any application downtime.
That’s especially true if you use AMD’s free open-source tool known as VAMT, short for VMware Architecture Migration Tool. VAMT automates cold migration. In one AMD test, it migrated hundreds of VMs in just an hour.
So if your customers among those struggling to find room for AI systems in their already-crowded and power-strapped data centers, tell them consider a move to AMD.
Do More:
- Explore AMD EPYC processors
- Download the AMD white paper: Virtual Machine Migration Made Easy