What's a Microserver and Why Do I Want One?

Servers trump all other network components in both size and power. Although, when it comes to the most basic computing tasks, a full-sized server is sometimes too big. To save companies space, newly designed microservers are being utilized. Microservers are a big step in server efficiency, both in data usage and saving money.

A microserver is basically a server that is stripped down as much as possible. What a microserver lacks in power, it makes up for by being super-efficient at one simple task. As great as full-sized servers are, it can be a waste to ask a big server to do small jobs like hosting company files. Because microservers are designed to handle specific tasks, they will not replace full-sized servers, but rather, microservers will complement large servers and sit alongside them. This arrangement will free up the workload on the big servers so they can dedicate more resources towards more demanding applications.

How exactly do microservers do such a good job at little tasks? HP's chief technologist Dave Chalmers explains:

If you think about how an x86 processor is typically architected today, there are hundreds of millions of transistors on there. A huge chunk of the real estate is involved in cache management and providing performance enhancements for the processor. When you're doing web page serving you don't use any of those transistors, so that's effectively cost and power consumption that give you no benefit.

On top of being overkill with resources for small tasks, full-sized servers are also notorious at consuming energy. One reason is because large servers have powerful processors that can drain up to 90W of thermal design power (TDP). The board on a microserver can run at 45W of TDP and even has the potential to operate lower than 10W. You don't have to know what a TDP is to see that there is big energy savings between 90W and 10W.

Microservers take up significantly less space than a full-sized server. A microserver is made up of a single integrated circuit that includes a CPU, memory, and a system Input/output. Because microservers are smaller in size and use considerably less power, they will put out very little heat. This will translate to energy savings when cooling a warm server room.

Because microservers have cooler running temperatures and they are small in size, they can be crammed together in existing server chassis. This is an attractive feature for businesses looking to add microservers to their IT infrastructure because it will let them use the existing components of their network like cables, switches, and other NAS devices. To study the efficiency of microservers, HP recently did a test to see how many microservers it would take to do the workload of a light scale-out application that required 10 racks of 1U servers. The result, 1,600 Calxeda EnergyCore microservers did the job, and only took up half a server rack! The saving from equipment costs totaled 63%, and the energy savings were 89%.

Reasons like this are why microserver sales are booming. Microservers are expected to account for one fifth of all server sales within the next 2-3 years. The primary purchasers of microservers will be datacenters, a booming market in its own right. Although, the market for microservers is not limited to big data centers; medium to large-sized companies that have big IT infrastructures will also benefit from adapting microservers.

Maybe your business doesn't have a datacenter, but even if you have a server room with a few or more servers, you can still benefit from the same energy saving principles that microservers can present. Computerware can overhaul all of your servers to make them more efficient with a process called server virtualization. This process will take your older servers that drain energy, and condense them into newer server units that are often underutilized. Server virtualization can provide energy savings for businesses by reducing server power consumption by up to 80%. Additionally, server virtualization can clear out the older servers and condense them by as much as 4:1!

Do you want to make your IT infrastructure more efficient and have all of your technology work for you? Then call Computerware at (703) 821-8200.