Buying a new server takes significant prep work. Beyond pinpointing the data center’s needs and how the server will meet them, there are budgetary, compatibility, and vendor considerations to address, as well.
Determine The Features That Are Most Important
Charles King, president and principal analyst at Pund-IT, counts CPUs, memory, and I/O as the most critical server features, though their relative importance depends on the application and workload they’ll support. Companies running a business-critical database or online transaction program, for example, should eye a higher-end CPU/system than what’s needed for general-purpose applications. For virtualization-related use, spend more for extra memory and I/O.
Mark Bowker, Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst, says that too often, IT purchases a server with more capacity than needed, which provides the comfort of extra headroom but also incurs additional expense. “IT should understand what the latest processor chipset is on the market and what the stated road map of the chip manufacturers are,” he says. “This will help avoid buying into servers that are at the end of a product lifecycle.”