High-density server and micro-server as data center purchasing hotspot

"Tenkine Server channel March 4 message" cloud Computing's impact on the server market is obvious, the server white card suppliers with the rise of the Chinese cloud services market, more users are no longer using traditional server supplier products, more flexible high-density server and micro-server customization program to become the first choice for data center users.

In 2013, 14% of the server shipped to the cloud applications, and in 2014 increased to more than 20%, the number of direct procurement servers in the enterprise decreased. In the future, the proportion of enterprise servers in the overall market will be less and less. A survey agency predicts that in the next few years the server market's shipping growth will come mainly from customer demand for newer, lower-cost micro-servers. The new generation of micro-servers is more widely used in data center and cloud computing, especially in the 64-bit server market with ARM core solutions.

The ARM core micro-server is promising, but Intel's continued power to the micro-server market is not negligible. In the traditional server area, there are already other new types of competition and challenges, customized server vendors to the traditional server supplier impact, some cloud computing vendors from the original HP and Dell solutions to the adoption of customized products.

Currently in the Internet market, Google and Amazon are custom server buyers. With the maturity of China's cloud computing market, traditional international manufacturers such as HP and Dell will not only face competition from white-label server suppliers, but also meet the challenges of Chinese local server manufacturers such as Huawei, Wave, Dawn and Lenovo.

In server models, high-density servers are a new type of rise. High-density servers this kind of system in the most economical way, uses a similar blade server chassis design structure, with the storage, the network equipment effective connection.

From the point of view of data center deployment, saving overall land area needs to be considered from every ring detail. Thus the space occupied by the thousands of cloud infrastructures that make up the data center operation system will also be taken into account. The traditional server scale is often huge, occupy the space appalling, is apt to be millions of servers to build a data center, cause space of need not waste to imagine. In this case, a server with high density and low power consumption is out of the picture. In the computer Room limited space, the energy consumption cost rises, the green environmental protection cries under the multiple pressure, some companies have given this kind of high-density server's response plan. The main solution is the multi-module high-density server, blade server, other customized high-density servers and other solutions, including modular high-density server most popular with domestic users.

The common features of high-density servers are: one is through scalable, dual motherboards, horizontal expansion, such as the design means to achieve high-density effect; the other is to share power supply, fan, etc., or using micro-fan, using virtualization technology to reduce the network card component equipment, thereby reducing the overall power consumption of the server, while responding to user needs, Flexible and scalable within specific industry requirements. High-density servers with a common rack server using separate power supply and fan design, in the same chassis by a number of server nodes sharing power and fans, thereby greatly improving the power and cooling system efficiency, and make the machine in the weight of lighter, lower cost. High-density server versatility is better than a blade server and is more productive in terms of cost reduction.

Domestic internet providers have begun to explore the use of high-density servers in data centers, and Scorpio's plan was formally presented in 2011 and the initial technical specifications were established at the end of the same year. In this project, the big three of China's internet, Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, are the main players, while the industry's boss, Intel, is the role of technical advisor. Unlike the depth of customization at the server level abroad, China's internet giants have placed customized units at the cabinet level.

The number of users the Internet provider faces is staggering, and the number of servers is never measured in Taiwan. Therefore, it is appropriate to enlarge the size of the customized scale can be considered from a higher level of network, wiring, power supply, cooling, load-bearing, distribution and other links, so that the operation of customized server and operational efficiency to higher, while also retaining the appropriate flexibility. While customizing servers in cabinets is more difficult and costly to consider than customizing a single server, the TCO reduction associated with machine cabinet customization can quickly make up for the money spent in the development phase.

The wave has already launched a corresponding solution for Scorpio, which is the Smartrack machine cabinet server. Smartrack is a kind of customized solution specially developed for Internet and communication operators, the machine cabinet server breaks the traditional server inherent design structure, abandons the traditional server single power supply, fan, management exclusive design idea, and unifies the power supply, heat dissipation and management unit. The overall production of the product, overall deployment, so that the deployment of objects from a single server into an integrated data center module, and also has an automated arrival consistency and state inspection system, after the power to automatically complete the entire cabinet all parts of the state monitoring, making the arrival inspection time from the original 1-2 hours, shortened to the minute level.

Smartrack rebuild the traditional server power supply design scheme, take the unit as the whole unit to pool the power supply units, which reduces the number of the supply modules from 80 to 8. In addition, the unified concentration of auxiliary modules also reduces the space footprint, the Smart rack theory can support 80 compute nodes, while the traditional server can only deploy 10-30 nodes in this space, the deployment density is greatly improved. Moreover, the product is also equipped with a centralized management module, with the wave Rui Jie Server Management suite, you can achieve the unified management and maintenance of the data center.

Lenovo Group's enterprise-class product Division (EPG) also announced its development strategy in the IPDC (Internet/data center) industry and launched a variety of Thinkserver servers for the IPDC industry. For the IPDC industry, Lenovo Group launched products, including Thinkserver family cabinets high-density server DC5000, high-density server SD330, SS430, Storage server RD430, rd430x, And Lenovo for the IPDC industry customer demand characteristics optimized Thinkserver general-purpose server products, SmartGrid Intelligent Power Monitoring management program.

To sum up, in the in-depth development of cloud computing, the server market is facing new challenges. Especially for Internet providers of server products and solutions are becoming a new growth force, high-density and low-power customization solutions become a new growth point for server manufacturers.