Network servers : Serving in Slowdown

Network servers are critical elements of an enterprise's IT set up.
Applications ranging from core transaction automation such as ERP to
collaboration, work flow applications and Web access. Since the basic skeleton
of an enterprise is dependent on its servers network, these simple engines have
taken a pivotal role in an organization's infrastucture.

In QI 2008, the worldwide server market was bullish with a total sale of $13
bn, a 3.5% gain from the first quarter of 2007 according to IDC. Unit sales
topped 2 mn, which, if annualized, means server unit sales will surpass that of
8 mn servers sold in 2007. However, by the end of Q3, the server market started
becoming frail and server sales did not add a great number.

Trendsetters

In the current economic slump, the enterprises are trying to reduce
investments, buying only on those products or services that are critical.
Virtualization is the buzz word in the present scenario. The organizations can
get more bang for the buck by implementing virtualization software rather than
buying new servers.

There are plenty of virtualization products in the market right now to help
tighten IT budgets. Enterprise-grade products like VMWare server and VMWESXi are
some of the options. There is also Hyper-V which offers economic benefits
through Windows Server 2008. Customers can consolidate multiple server roles as
separate VMs running on a single physical machine while also running multiple
different operating systems -Windows, Linux and others-in parallel, on a single
server leveraging the power of x64 computing.

Undisputably, virtualization is helping in the short term. Even though server
virtualization reduces footprints, it is a boost for ASPs because virtualized
machines need more memory and CPU to run properly. Sometimes customers want new
iron to run new virtualization hypervisors, especially since newer x64, RISC,
and Itanium processors have features that help hypervisors run more efficiently.

Some hypervisors actually require hardware features to operate, and will not
run on older iron. But virtual private server virtualization tools like Solaris
containers and Virtuozzo can work on older iron.

Going beyond the blade is the slogan for the year ahead. This year began with
hype about green IT, and servers will continue to evolve in 2009 beyond the
blade server stage that exists today. This evolution will simplify the
provisioning of capacity to meet growing needs. It will also make it easier on
the inventory of systems, eliminating the need to track and purchase various
sizes and configurations. The result will be higher utilization because of
lessened 'waste' of resources that are in wrong configuration. Going hand in
hand with growing beyond blade servers, shifting to more efficient products can
allow for a greener energy footprint. There are multiple regulations designed to
govern companies in building data centers due to their impact on power grids and
carbon emissions.

All the major CPU vendors have now firmly adopted integrated memory
controllers with a multi-core NUMA architecture. In the future, we can look to
CPU real-estate being dedicated to application-specific functions and other
techniques such as individual core power scaling being adopted and integrated
into operating systems. Data centers that have already moved to a tiered storage
architecture such as iSCSI, may see the opportunity of further reducing energy
consumption and increasing compute density by entirely removing rotating media
from all other compute tiers as the cost of solid state storage continues to
fall.

Experts panel

Ashok Tripathy, general manager & head, Wipro Personal Computing Vikas Kakkar, senior technologist and data management ambassador, Sun Microsystems Pallab Talukdar, director, enterprise business, Dell India R Ravichandran, director, sales, Intel South Asia

Hybrid Solutions

To match the current needs, systems with hybrid architectures are fast
picking up. Speed and performance is needed to shatter the I/O bottlenecks with
no administrator intervention. In fact, hybrid storage pools with SSDs can
improve I/O performance by 100x. There are products that combine DRAM, SSDs, and
HDDs to deliver improved performance and increased capacity while significantly
lowering power consumption, thus helping in cost efficiency.

For a large number of enterprises, the biggest concern is speed, and enhanced
storage in limited space. Keeping in view these requirements of enterprises, the
server makers have innovative products with high bandwidth low-latency based
infiniband interface on network servers which deliver throughput of 20 Gbps DDR
and 40 Gbps QDR. The Indian market is rich with products with DDR and QDR based
high-speed network bandwidth solutions in network server offering double density
in 1U space.

The hybrid server platform designs offer high storage density in a server
with a high data throughput. These servers can deliver storage density that is
up to five times that of traditional server offerings. These enable companies to
host high-bandwidth applications and data on a single platform at approximately
half the cost of alternative solutions.

By integrating high storage density and throughput vendors have introduced
servers for customers who use demanding high-bandwidth applications such as HPC,
data warehousing/business intelligence, digital media streaming, digital
surveillance and data analysis. Such hybrids reduce system complexity and allows
data center managers to make more efficient use of available space. There are
products that offer up to 24 Tb of storage in seven inches of rack space with
sustained throughput of up to 2 Gbps from disk to memory, and costs as low as $2
per gigabyte.

A range of hybrid server platforms integrate storage, computing and
networking capabilities into one system, to simplify the demands of various
business applications. Also, they support the latest quad core processors, and
hence provide energy-efficient computing environment and improved virtualization
performance. They provide capacity on-demand with swappable compute and storage
capabilities.

There are offerings like unified storage file systems that seamlessly
integrate SSDs and HDD and optimize access to different media types. The file
system transparently manages data placement, directing frequently-used data to
fast SSDs and less-frequently used data to slower, less expensive HDDs.

The enterprises look at options that are easy to use and flexible. Simplified
applications and administration are always preferred. Thus the vendor should
design its offering around high data availability with cluster option,
enterprise data services with no additional licensing fee. While opting for
server solutions the enterprises weigh the performance scalability of the kind
of servers they are putting their money into. Reliability, availability and
serviceability are other concerns of the enterprises along with reduction of
space and power consumption. Any compromise on this impacts the business
directly.

Hence emphasis on multi-core architecture on server scaling has become
mainstream. Since multi-core processors are highly power-efficient they help to
drive down costs.

The growth in the server segment is largely driven by continual requirement
of increasing performance while cutting costs. The enterprises need to reduce
space and energy costs and increase scalability.

Server solutions should be planned keeping in mind the advantages of
commodity economics, enabling organizations to preserve the cost benefits of
industry-standard components while optimizing uptime. Vendors suggest that
customers do not go by hype and hoopla in server technology and platforms. They
must look at their real needs and choose the right partner who can architect
server solutions to address the need. That is the only way to optimize costs.

Heena Jhingan

heenaj@cybermedia.co.in