Spotify has recently chosen to move to SGI Rackable C1001 half-depth servers and to standardize them at its collocation data center from Stockholm, Sweden. Spotify has become very popular during the past years as a high-quality, on-demand streaming-music service and is currently using custom-made SGI 1U high rack-mount servers that had to be able to sustain all the data-delivery demands as well as the processing necessities coming from the ever-increasing user base. Choosing SGI's servers, Spotify was able to reduce its energy costs and obtain twice the density within a similar footprint, compared with the values of its previous server provider.

The streaming service has acquired more than five million users since it was launched, therefore it needed a server solution that could be easily adjusted and extremely dense but also energy efficient so that the continuously growing company could capitalize on reduced space and cut-down costs.

Spotify settled for SGI to extend all its capabilities, including streaming, storage and search, and also to gain the possibility to be scaled, since the company wants to enter the mobile phone-app market and to extend to other areas such as China and the United States. On the other hand, the new server solution also needed to be seamlessly integrated so that the users would not be prevented from accessing the on-demand streaming-music service.

“SGI servers are more space and energy efficient than our previous equipment, and the build-to-order hardware gives us the data center 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,” Emil Fredriksson, Spotify’s operations director, said. “With SGI, we achieved twice the density in the same footprint, which is imperative for our limited collocation data center space. We have also seen substantial reductions in energy consumption for significant cost savings and more environmentally friendly operations.”

In addition, the patented back-to-back mounting technique of SGI is best exploited using its half-depth, rack-mount servers, while also providing very efficient power supplies and leveraged data and processors for reducing data-center power consumption. More specifically, these servers come with up to 1,056 processing cores and 864TB of storage supported in one cabinet and can be set up with form factors ranging from 1U to 3U. Furthermore, SGI Rackable server solutions are capable of supporting even highly data-intensive applications due to their dual and quad-core x86-based processors, such as energy-efficient processors from AMD and Intel.

“SGI’s C1001 servers provide a vast amount of processing power to Spotify to deliver its popular streaming music services,” Rod Evans, vice president of sales for northern Europe at SGI, added. “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 center space and energy costs, much like Spotify has with SGI servers.”