Inventory issues that microservers need to address in 2014

AMD's first 64-bit ARM processor is in volume production in 2014. This has also given a new impetus to the micro-server market, as the current similar to Hewlett-Packard and Most server vendors, such as Dell, are based on Intel's Atom processors, which are clearly slightly behind ARMs in terms of high-density, low-power consumption, but we see a bright future for the micro-server market , But also pay attention to the problems encountered in the promotion of micro-server this sub-product.

Understanding and difference

Microservices bring some fairly new hardware specifications to the data center, bypassing the blade concept that has existed for many years in the data center. Perhaps the data center operations staff did not understand the difference between microservers and blade servers, but from data center designers to front-line operators have to learn new design and operation methods. How micro-server positioning is different from the traditional blade server is also a product promotion need to pay attention to a basic point.

We see that both microservers and blade servers are high-density features, but they have different workload scenarios, which is the difference in computing power. The emergence of micro-server is more based on power considerations, while the blade server is to increase the computational density. Therefore, the positioning of the two in the server market is different. What is certain is that the micro server will divert the blade server market, but the blade server future application scenario will be more refined. Micro-server and blade server competition will bring new vitality to the high-density server market.

standardization

The mainstream x86 server market has basically been around the standardization of Intel processing, AMD grabbed the market share is very limited. Intel's server chip performance is strong, its ability is well known. In the micro-server market, Intel has introduced a low-power version of its traditional server chip, as well as a server-class version of the Atom chip.

ARM new products in the occupation of the traditional mobile terminal market began to seek expansion in the data center market, but ARM ecosystem in the data center market is not perfect, so this also limits the micro-server products equipped with ARM in the short term and Can not effectively seize the market.

Coming into 2014, ARM Associates announced the specification for the ARM Server Foundation System Architecture, which is designed to define basic requirements for ARM SoCs and to help third-party vendors design and manufacture ARM processor-based server products. As ARM completes its hardware standardization, ARM is also steadily advancing software support. The mainstream Linux distribution already fully supports the ARM processor architecture.

Scale and load

The traditional server size is well known in the world. Most vendors and implementation providers already have proven tools to quickly determine server and processor configurations. While micro-servers are just about to enter the market, you or your partner may also want to guess how much a micro-server will be deployed at - which can be costly if not done well.

Microservices are attractive in terms of power consumption and space savings, but not the most appropriate type of workload. Because microserver processors often eliminate some of the techniques embedded in high-end server chips, it is clear that such a processor is not the best choice for complex analysis or graphing.

Most vendors refer to areas such as Web servers or virtual desktops, but they lack convincing use cases to demonstrate the savings achieved through the use of microservers. One of the biggest benefits of a technology like virtualization is that you can dynamically allocate processor and memory resources as workload switches. With Microservices, the resources you can get once you place an order are physically fixed. After all, if the workload that can be done with two traditional blades requires 4 or 5 microservers, so-called savings are purely fictitious.

in conclusion

I believe micro-server is a product that is looking for the market. Of course, some specific scenarios are very suitable for micro-server. But customers are actually paying for a technology that is not fully standardized yet has the complexity of workloads and new listings. Microservices have not yet formed a fierce competition and commoditized like the standard x86 server market. Unless you are a high-volume web provider or a power-hungry enterprise, there is a compelling reason to make sure you move to microservers before making a decision.