Servers, whether the tall wardrobe type or those pizza-box slices of hardware that slide into racks in data centre ovens, seem suddenly almost sexy.
We have had lavish beauty-contest launches from AMD and Intel on Monday and Tuesday of new high-performance server chips at San Francisco’s De Young Museum and the old Federal Reserve building respectively.
Sashaying down the microcircuitry catwalk, Intel’s Xeon 7500s and AMD’s Opteron 6000s won admiring testimonials from data-crunching executives for their lean energy needs and powerful performance, giving them the ability to pay for themselves in savings on electricity and licensing costs in a matter of months.
HP, Dell, Cray, SGI and Acer – a new AMD vendor – are among those introducing new systems based on the 6000s, which are either eight or 12-core processors.
HP, Dell, Cray, SGI, IBM, Oracle and many other vendors have announced systems based on the 7500s, which have up to eight cores.
AMD says it is delivering more cores – or processing brains – and more memory for less money. Intel says data centres can replace 20 single-core servers with a single 7500 system. The 7500s follow the launch of 5600 chips for the “volume server” market two weeks ago.
“Intel typically has done really well in multiprocessor [systems], in government and done fairly well in high-performance computing. AMD typically does really well in the price/performance area,” says Jim Ganthier, head of marketing for HP’s Industry Standard Servers, which feature both processors.
Intel has more than 80 per cent market share in servers, but the pie seems about to get bigger this year with a once-in-a-decade “inflection point”, according to the research firm IDC, where customers are re-evaluating their needs and upgrading their infrastructures.
An increase in data to be managed, the growth of cloud computing, the need for real-time business information and the compelling benefits of virtualisation technology – where one server can be split into many virtual machines – are among the factors prompting the refreshing of equipment.
The most alluring argument for an upgrade is the cost savings, with HP claiming outlays on new equipment can be recovered in less than a quarter.
“When our CIOs [chief information officers] go and have conversations with their CFOs [chief financial officers], they can promise them a two-month ROI [Return On Investment] . These are radical savings that we’re delivering to our customers,” says Mr Ganthier.
