back to article Intel: best days are ahead for servers

As it comes off yet another global recession, and with a severe freeze in IT spending starting to thaw, Intel's server-chip lineup is perhaps the best Chipzilla The Continuum has ever put into the field - including its much-delayed and much-maligned quad-core Itanium 9300s. What a difference seven years makes. Today, rival …

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  1. Nik Simpson

    EMC and x86

    Tim,

    Clariion and the most recent iteration of DMX already use x86 processor, Clariion has been based on largely commodity hardware since it's inception.

  2. Mikel
    Go

    The money from virt is in RAM, network and storage - not cpu

    My goodness, but those 8GB RDIMMS are expensive and you need a lot of 'em. And have you seen how fond EMC is of those 200GB SSDs? Wow, have you priced 10Gbps ethernet ports lately? Each of these things makes the priciest W5680 Xeon look like bargain bin parts.

    The LeftHand (HP P4000 series) also uses the Nehalem chips in the current generation, and has always been Xeon based.

    VMWare is spendy too - the license per CPU costs much more than the CPU.

  3. Adam 73
    Stop

    @Nik; Its not just about using the same parts

    Its actuially about using the same platform!

    Just to use x86 chips does not make a product commodity.

    The P4000 approach is far better, they actually use x86 servers, which means the same box could be used as either a storage controller OR a server platform, that lets HP drive economies of scale far better as they only need 1 production line.

    Also Clarrion is not based on commodity hardware, as far as I was aware the disks are still EMC only? Why does a 450GB 15k enterprise disk from EMC cost me 4 times more than a 450GB 15k enterprise disk off of Dell of HP from their x86 line?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @Adam 73

      "Why does a 450GB 15k enterprise disk from EMC cost me 4 times more than a 450GB 15k enterprise disk off of Dell of HP from their x86 line?"

      Probably because they can charge you that and you have no choice - you are limited to using only their special firmware variants, even though I suspect there is nothing special about the disk in real terms (i.e. compared to a normal 'enterprise class' HDD).

      That is one great advantage of the Sun/Oracle "open storage", you get at least 50% more usable storage per pound and can use non-Sun disks if you want to really go cheap (not warranted of course). The disadvantage is the Sun kit has sucked big time for most of the last year! Why can't they fix the damned stuff?!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Why SUN Kit is so poor these days

        Because from late 2008 up until the merger with Oracle, SUN laid off everyone who actually knew their hardware product lines. And if you really do some digging, their hardware motherboards are being debugged by FOXCONN at their Houston location. (Job postings for debug positions were listed back around March 15th)

        Now you know the reason, cheers

        yet another ex-SUN employee

  4. Nigel 11
    Boffin

    "Some people don't want servers, even if they need them".

    Or, they've worked out that "entry-level server" means sluggish PC packed with industry-incompatible hardware that's supposed to be more reliable, but which in practice is guaranteed to break down a few days after the warranty runs out, and which then cannot be repaired for less han the cost of a new entry-level server, and a ten-day wait for the spare part. Oh yes, and an extra £500 up front for the privilege. And extra-noisy fans.

    Better to buy a good industry-standard desktop system with twin RAID-1-able disks and call it your server. With the cash you've saved you could buy another one and keep it a cupboard as your cold fail-over. Or just grab a spare part out of the office junior's desktop should you ever need it .

    They'd like you to think that what you've just read is highly technical content. (The scary thing is that for so many people, it is).

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