PCR Tech and IT retail, distribution and vendor news
AMD has appointed Cisco’s CTO for UCS servers in a bid to accelerate its own server offerings. Raghunath Nambiar joined AMD’s Datacenter Ecosystems and Solutions team earlier this month, according to The Register.
Stepping into the role of corporate VP, Nambiar brings a wealth of relevant experience to the role. As well as spearheading Cisco’s UCS server range, Nambiar has also served as a Distinguised Engineer at Cisco and has served as the committee chair of the Transaction Processing Performance Council.
AMD are yet to comment specifically on Nambiar’s appointment, however they have said that they ‘are investing in top talent’. “We are investing in top talent to ensure we drive strategic partnerships and relationships with key partners to ensure that the ecosystem for AMD datacenter products continues to expand and flourish," a spokesperson said.
Earlier this month, AMD announced multiple initiatives with Dell in conjunction with its server arm. Dell says AMD’s servers deliver up to 20 per cent lower cost of ownership in a single-socket, four-node, VSAN configuration.
In a recent interview with PCR, Neil Spicer, EMEA component channel sales director at AMD said that he expects AMD’s data centre business to grow over the next year. “We see tremendous new opportunities with our data centre business on both the CPU and GPU side, and the differentiation of AMD as the only company who can currently deliver both, so we are continuing to invest in the roadmap and we are working hard on the next-generation products to accelerate the pace of our innovation. Unlike parts of the consumer desktop market that can take off quickly, server growth builds a bit slower. If you look at the consumer enthusiast market where we launched Ryzen early in 2017, our progress is like a plane taking off. The server market is more like a large, heavily loaded freight train leaving the station. It takes a while for the train to accelerate to top speed, but once you are there is significant momentum.
“The value proposition of our EPYC processors is very strong and we believe it will only get stronger over time as we get more applications tuned to EPYC. This is not a price play, but it really is a performance and flexibility play for our customers. In November, HP Enterprise announced the DL385, which is the highest volume platform in the server market, with EPYC which will be available for shipments in December. We’ve also announced that both Microsoft Azure and Baidu have deployed AMD EPYC in their data centres.”
