2007 Server market and Technology trend forecast

AMD's multi-core Hao long, Intel's dual-core Itanium, Sun's full range of Niagara servers, IBM's POWER6, HP's hp-ux11iv3, and the soft cluster operating system ... The end of the extraordinary 2006, but also look forward to the server really come the dual-core era, people pay attention to the server itself, and more will be Web2.0 applications and servers together to measure, originally belong to the "server" of composite words more prominent "service" two words. The application of the blade server, server operating system, and virtualization technology will be further implemented in 2007.

"Double core" enters the popularization stage

Many people will 2006 as a dual-core universal year, but according to the sales feedback from many manufacturers, 2006 is only the beginning of the acceptance and understanding of the year, dual-core and multi-core servers will be in 2007 to become the x86 server decision power. Intel has set a timetable for the four core to enter the midrange market, which will launch the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6400 in the third quarter of 2007, as Intel will sell the existing Core 2 Quad Q6600 at the end of the second quarter of 2007, Down from $851 per thousand to $530 trillion, there are indications that the price of dual-core processors will also fall sharply. Both Intel and AMD have made further explicit their "dual-core" products, including Intel's Xeon Dempsey and dual-core Itanium Montecito, AMD's 4-core OPTERON,IBM Power6 and Sun's Niagara II have all appeared in succession, Formed a dual-core-led, to multi-core development of the inevitable trend. Multi-core Processor computing platform for the strength and the king's demeanor revealed that the education industry is looking forward to, over the years, "the bottom of the server" upgrade purchase, will also enjoy a "double core meal."

POWER6 has attracted more attention in the 2007 years when Intel and AMD will also be "in a rush" for their four core processors. The goal of POWER6 is to reach a frequency of 4GHz to 5GHZ, while the unique 65 nano-insulated silicon (SOI) technology, 10-layer metal sheet technology, in the same power performance increased by 30% expectations, which gives us a sense of awe. Of course, it's only a corner of the mystery, and it all has to wait until the 2007 international Solid State Circuit Conference (held in San Francisco, USA, in February) to fully understand the isscc,2007.

Fb-dimm fire up?

Fb-dimm's high power consumption, high cost and high latency make the technology's popularization encounter unprecedented difficulties. Intel, which has been pushing hard for Fb-dimm-spec memory, may shrink its outreach program, and Intel will not be able to adopt more than 10% of its FB-DIMM memory in the server product line. Intel and its OEM companies initially planned to provide support for FB-DIMM in 2007, but under the latest plan, the currently widely used registered DIMMs will continue to occupy the majority of Intel servers. At the end of 2006, AMD disclosed many information about AMD's next-generation quad-core architecture processor, AMD started using Barcelona (Barcelona) as the code name for the quad-core server processor, and as the next-generation kernel server named after the city. Shanghai (upgraded version of Barcelona) has determined that DDR2 memory is still used.

The education industry should also consider power consumption

From the day the computer was invented, engineers and users have never stopped the pursuit of computing performance, although in the 2004 due to the power consumption, manufacturing technology and materials and other problems caused some stagnation, but with new technology, new materials and multi-core architecture to mitigate the contradictions, so in 2006 years, we can see from the CPU, The performance of server system to high-performance computer jumped again. With the increasing density of computing environment, power management in the 2007 has become more and more users of procurement indicators. At a prize meeting, several information center managers calculate the account: a 1U rack-designed server based on AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon processor, consumes about 300w-400w power , the power consumption of a rack installed by such 24 machines will be able to achieve 7.2kw-9.6kw, everyone is worried after listening.

"If efficiency and power consumption remain constant for the next few years, the cost of electricity will easily exceed the cost of hardware and is likely to be quite large," Luiz Andre Barroso, a Google engineer, said in the ACM Queue magazine. The direction of all kinds of speech, the single chip processing technology as a temporary solution, relying solely on single chip processing technology does not solve the power challenge. We hope that in the next two or three years, the next generation of processors will be able to alleviate, and the server's basic circuit and architecture innovation is the solution to the long-term power consumption.

SAS hard drive into preferred

The SAS (serial attached SCSI) hard disk specifications that the industry has proposed a few years ago, and the 2006 server offerings will also support SAS hard drives as standard configurations. SAS has experienced 2006 years of vigorous promotion, 2007 will be its mature year, in the storage device provider as the vanguard of the drive, the SAS hard disk technology 2007 full popularity can be conclusive. Until 2006, mainstream server disks were designed with a 3.5-inch design, while SAS drives had a 2.5-inch specification In addition to the traditional 3.5-inch specification. This result allows more disks to be installed in the limited space of the rack server. To augment the capacity of the storage system and to make room for additional accessories (better ventilation and cooling), the use of 8 2.5-inch SAS HDD bits within the 2U altitude has become the choice for most OEM server vendors. But as the hard disk capacity increases and the cost is reduced, the RAID6 technology, as a more secure, will come along with the SAS trend.

Is virtual technology still "virtual"?

Over the past 2006 years, many educational users have begun to understand the virtualization technology, which not only expands the capacity of the hardware, but also simplifies the reconfiguration of the software. The virtualization technology of server CPU can simulate multiple CPUs in a single CPU, allow a platform to run multiple operating systems simultaneously, and the application can operate in each other's independent space without shadow, thereby significantly improving the efficiency of the computer.

As the x86 Architecture server virtualization technology developed by VMware is gaining more and more users ' approval, the 2007 server virtualization technology may no longer be "hot, but not able to hold" the phenomenon. Virtual partitioning technology, including hardware zoning, software zoning, resource zoning and other partitioning technology, which allows us to run, including UNIX, linux,windows and other operating systems, improve the entire Campus network application system utilization. In addition, the load manager can allocate resources according to the load of the server, and can even refine the resources such as CPU, memory, disk bandwidth and so on. A lot of 2006 years of university case prompts us, a "virtual with reality" of the 2007 has arrived.