In a move which apparently is an upshot of Advanced Micro Devices' (AMD) recent, notably aggressive, acquisition of SeaMicro, the chipmaker revealed in a Monday announcement that it was venturing into the servers and storage arena with new datacentre hardware.

Announcing its SM15000 server and 'Freedom Fabric' storage enclosures on Monday, AMD clearly highlighted its latest attempts in tackling storage problems in the cloud datacentre by enhancing the ability of the servers to manage storage.

The SM15000 server will have the capability of managing up to 5 petabytes of storage split across 1,408 disks or SSDs; thanks largely to the SeaMicro technology which facilitates companies in managing huge amounts of storage by extending the company's proprietary 'Freedom Fabric.'

SeaMicro's ASIC-based fabric - based around a toroidal interconnect topology, and boasting 1.2 terabits of bisection bandwidth - can extend beyond the server itself, to work with separate storage enclosures that can be tied together; thereby allowing the server to work like a SAN.

As per AMD, the SM15000 server will support both AMD and Intel processors; with the AMD system featuring 64 sockets, each with an 8-core AMD Opteron processor, totaling up to 512 cores; the Intel system will run up to 64 quad core 'Ivy Bridge' Xeon processors, totaling up to 256 cores. Moreover, while the AMD system will support 4TB of DRAM; the Intel system will support 2TB of DRAM.

The AMD and Intel SM15000 servers will both hit the markets in November; and their price range will start at $139,000.