One trend that is really starting to take shape in the server industry is that big servers are back! That doesn't mean big servers ever disappeared off the map. Historically bigger servers with 4 or more processor sockets have been 7-8% of the server market from a volume perspective. And bigger servers have always been used for scalable, data-demanding enterprise applications which IT values for it's performance, headroom and reliability. What we're seeing now is a greater shift in popularity towards these servers as IT invests more and more in this direction.
So, why is that? Well, check out this video and then let me know if you agree or disagree. After you watch it I'd also be curious to learn more about what you value as the most important buying criteria when you go big.
I was interested in your pod cast and made me think of when I managed datacenters with constraints on space, power and cooling.
From a datacenter point of view, big servers coupled with virtualization do in fact help on power, cooling and space efficiency.
Depending on the datacenter focus:
as examples, the datacenter may dedicate up to 50% of its power to compute cycles, 25% to HVAC and 25% to other such as storage.
These numbers can be higher in HVAC and lower in compute cycles as demand for server performance and compute cycles climb as the number of physical servers climb increasing the BTU output.
As we know, datacenters are costly to create and even more costly to retro-fit. As infrastructure components can be modified a bit such as cooling and power, the space is harder without complete relocation at times. This is where virtualization and big servers certainly can play an excellent role.
The larger servers allow for more cores and memory to be allocated across the virtual servers based on server support requirements. The fewer physical devices reduces the power and cooling requirements and opens more space for the larger servers. Now we get other efficiencies such as easier recovery/landing in server outage/demand respectively.
The grid or heavy compute cycle focused datacenters may not benefit from the virtualization as much as they will from the more power efficient/higher performance big servers.
I would expect, as you note, that the large server demand will continue to increase as the power/performance efficiencies noted above with the well known datacenter constraints mentioned finally meet.
All in all, good news for datacenter managers needing to meet the demands of their customers.