Three-factor performance, power consumption and virtualization of server procurement

Today's server market, whether from the technical level, or from the application level, is facing more and more challenges, of course, for chip manufacturers and server manufacturers to bring more opportunities.





from the perspective of application, on the one hand, many applications to server performance requirements more and more high, like the emerging Internet applications, video computing, High-performance computing, and so on, the computational performance, storage performance, I/O throughput capabilities have put forward higher requirements; Secondly, the low utilization of server is a realistic problem that can not be neglected. , according to statistics, the average server usage rate is only about 15%, this low utilization rate not only causes the unnecessary waste of server resources, but also brings many new problems to the space, cost and management of the data center. Thirdly, in the background of energy shortage, the national and social demands for environmental protection are more and more high, The problem of the energy consumption of the server is widely concerned.


in the past, we are measuring a server, may be mainly to see performance, cost-effective and other factors. But now, whether the manufacturer in the design of the server, or users in the procurement and use of the server, the "Only performance theory" view is obviously very outdated.





"Our focus today has been diversified, and in the design process of server product development, we will consider three core factors, namely performance, energy efficiency and virtualization." We may have been more focused on performance in the past, but now we take into account energy consumption, performance per watt, and so on. "We attach great importance to virtualization and make a lot of investments," says Kirk B. Skaugen, vice president and general manager of the Server Platform Division, Intel Corporation's Digital Enterprise division, in a recent interview with the IT168 server channel. Not only did we invest 218 million of dollars in VMware, we also invested in open source Xen and cooperated with Microsoft in Windows Hyper-V, and Sun's development in Solaris xVM. ”





everyone knows that in the era of performance decisions, the corresponding relationship between products and applications is relatively simple.





The reporter learned from an Intel Server Procurement Guide white paper for example, for infrastructure virtualization, mail and Web, networking, File/print, workgroup or departmental databases, streamlined business applications, rendering farms, application servers, scientific computing, extended financial services, or Java, and other standard applications, Because of the high requirements of cost control and easy management, the server based on the Xeon 5000 series processor is recommended.





applications for server consolidation/virtualization, enterprise-level databases, business intelligence (BI), ERP, supply chain Management (SCMT), decision Support, CRM, transaction-intensive applications such as E-commerce, and transaction-intensive, because of high performance requirements Therefore, users are recommended to purchase servers based on the Xeon 7000 series processors.





for a large scale database application, Data Warehouse, large ERP, large business analysis, real-time trading system, and other key business applications, due to high availability requirements, it is recommended that based on Itanium 2 processor-based servers.





Although this correspondence has not been broken, but we can also see that with the development of technology applications such as multicore computing, virtualization, and Energy efficiency computing, Intel's server product line is becoming more and more diverse-with dual-core products, four of nuclear products, and six of nuclear, eight-core products in the future, There are 65 nm of products, there are 45 nm products, both low voltage version of the processor, there are mainstream or high-performance processor products and so on.





in fact, it is understood that Intel is no longer simply using the traditional single path (up), two-way (DP) and multi-Way (MP) approach to differentiate the server market, but based on different application requirements to redefine the different market segments, and the introduction of different products to meet the needs of users. Therefore, users in the procurement of servers, but also need to cost, performance, power consumption, and so consider more comprehensive.