Future Proof Servers, Virtualization, and the Need for Massive Server Bandwidth

Those who follow the server industry have likely noticed a trend in four or greater CPU socket servers. For the past few years, these systems have been released with certain basic characteristics:

1) They usually have an extraordinary memory capacity. There are a number of systems already shipping with 256 GB memory capacity, with a possibility of 512 GB if/when 8 GB modules become available.

2) These systems generally have six or more x4 and greater PCI Express slots.

3) They are generally marketed for extreme enterprise usage, especially in regards to virtualization.

So the story is simply this; these servers are being designed for the ambiguous future of virtualization. They have lots of processing power, memory, and add-in PCI Express peripheral space for expandability.

For those of you just tuning in... Virtualization is simply a clever way of placing several operating systems on a single platform. Server hardware has been historically under utilized, so this is an attempt to more efficiently squeeze greater server potential out of a single box. This, of course leads to lower up front and recurring costs over the purchase of several systems to fulfill the same tasks. That's my .02 cent description for now.

The main item here is that virtualization is going to be much more demanding of server hardware. With multiple operating systems and applications on a single platform, the need for additional CPU, memory, and external bandwidth all increase dramatically.

This is one of the primary reasons why we need external bandwidth testing and public results. What good is a massively virtualized server if the data moving in and out of the server is being transferred at a snail's pace? We'll begin to explore this potential in some near future posts.