(22-Oct-10) Servers are the bedrock of a professional data center, so it’s vital that IT hardware buyers know what to look for and how to make wise purchasing decisions. The primary role of the server in a consolidated infrastructure is to provide processing capacity to host current and future application workloads; however, the server is a single node of capacity within multilevel integration that includes storage, networking, and virtualization.
John Sloan, lead research analyst at Info-Tech Research Group, suggests the following tips to ensure that you get the most for your ser-ver investment.
Balance maximum capacity with the lowest TCO. “The capacity of servers has grown by an order of magnitude over the past two years, so you might think you know what servers are capable of, but [if] you haven’t looked at servers in more than 18 months, it is time to look again,” Sloan says. “The capacity boost that you get with, say, an Intel Xeon 5600 chipset is like a tide that raises all boats. Differentiation will be around the edges with things like management tools, how the server integrates with other layers, and the level of redundancy built into the server.”