Spotify Chooses SGI Servers

SGI announced that Spotify Ltd, a digital on-demand streaming music service, has standardised on SGI Rackable C1001 half-depth servers at its Stockholm, Sweden, collocation data centre.

Built-to-order SGI 1U high rack-mount servers support the data delivery demands of Spotify’s rapidly growing user base, and the online music service’s data and processing requirements. With SGI’s servers, Spotify has realised twice the density in the same footprint compared to its previous server provider and a reduction in energy costs.

With more than five million users in the year since launch, Spotify required a powerful server solution that was easily scalable, and extraordinarily dense and energy efficient to capitalise on limited space and reduce costs for the rapidly growing start-up company. Spotify chose SGI to expand its streaming, storage and search capabilities and easily scale, as it plans to expand to the United States and China and to enter the mobile phone application market. Spotify also needed SGI to seamlessly integrate so as to not impact users’ ability to access its popular on-demand streaming music platform.

“SGI servers are more space and energy efficient than our previous equipment, and the built-to-order hardware gives us the data centre design flexibility that we need. The servers were also built exactly to our specifications, and arrived pre-racked and pre-cabled, ready for immediate installation,” said Emil Fredriksson, Spotify’s operations director. “With SGI, we achieved twice the density in the same footprint, which is imperative for our limited collocation data centre space. We have also seen substantial reductions in energy consumption for significant cost savings and more environmentally friendly operations.”

SGI’s half-depth, rack-mount servers leverage the company’s patented back-to-back mounting technique, and feature high efficiency power supplies, memory and processors to reduce data centre power consumption. The servers are available in configurations from 1U to 3U form factors, and offer up to 1,056 processing cores and 864TB of storage supported in a single cabinet. With dual and quad-core x86-based processors, including energy efficient, low wattage processors from AMD and Intel, SGI Rackable server solutions provide optimal computing power for even the most data-intensive applications.

“SGI’s C1001 servers provide a vast amount of processing power to Spotify to deliver its popular streaming music services,” said Rod Evans, vice president of sales of Northern Europe at SGI. “Given the challenging economy, density and efficiency are key for a growing start-up like Spotify. With the right infrastructure, businesses can now experience extraordinary savings on expensive data centre space and rising energy costs, much like Spotify has with SGI servers.”