Servers: It's About More Than Speed

Servers: It's About More Than Speed

Servers: It's About More Than Speed

Turn back the IT clock to ten years ago and the landscape was vastly different than it is today. It used to be that the main drivers of technology were speed increases. In recent years, many companies have found that speed is no longer the driving factor behind their server upgrades. Today, most business applications can run fine on platforms that are a few years old in fact, many applications are no longer CPU-bound (meaning they are not getting enough CPU resources). This meaning that they are I/O or network bound meaning the disk subsystem or network connections cannot handle the amount of data being thrown at them.

So what does this mean for IT departments? First, there is no longer a need to continue buying the "best of the best". IT managers have the flexibility to look at a wide range of systems, including that of refurbished. Instead of going to the business and asking for a huge chunk of the budget to buy new systems every few years, they can instead allocate the monetary resources to other areas while still ensuring that their IT needs are being met.

Where technology is taking us nowadays in terms of server evolution, is to a systems that delivers better subsystem performance. That I/O bound disk problem we talked about earlier is being addressed through better channel architecture for accessing the disk subsystem. In many cases, manufacturers are starting to introduce native fiber support for hooking up to large SAN arrays that may already exist in the organization.

Advances are also being made in terms of the number of cores a server has on the CPU. CPU's are getting smaller, and while their speeds are not changing much, manufacturers such as Intel and AMD are putting more and more cores (think of a core as a single CPU) onto a chip. This in turns helps servers handle tasks such as virtualization and distributed computing easier. It's not uncommon to see in many IT shops, single servers running many virtualized servers through the use of technology such as VMWare. This helps to drastically reduce cost, as there is no longer the "one server, one application" mentality. A single server can in essence be hosting a dozen or more virtualized servers within in.

As we run more systems, we need more memory and today's servers are coming with the ability to support 64GB of RAM or more. It wasn't too long ago when 4GB of RAM was "all we could possibly ever need". Due to architecture constraints, that was pretty much all that we were limited too. Today, the memory subsystems are getting redesigned and RAM is getting faster and faster. Some systems are even able to access multiple locations of memory at once a boon for virtualization as the I/O bottleneck when it comes to accessing RAM is slowly becoming a thing of the past.

Finally, servers are becoming more energy efficient, even as they become more powerful. Cooling and electricity costs have been a major consideration for companies for years. With the advent of servers that deliver more performance with less power (and as a result, less heat), combined with virtualization technology, the demand for power and cooling is leveling off. Expect this trend to continue, as more shops invest in virtualization technologies and vendors keep getting more efficient power supplies and other hardware components.

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