

Microserver Market Heats up: Intel S1200 - friism
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2012/12/11/MicroserverMarketHeatsUpIntelAtomS1200CentertonAnnouncement.aspx

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gdwatson
Honest question: What is the use case for these with the trend toward
virtualization on more powerful hardware? The machines are really neat, but
what in what fields are they used?

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erichocean
They're fantastic for redundant clusters (e.g. something Cassandra-like).
Virtualization doesn't help you there -- you actually need the physically
separate nodes.

Keeping power used down directly affects our rack costs, which only provide so
much power. We do _a lot_ to stay within that, so we only need 2U (and the
included power) instead of 4U or more, since our boards only require 2U.

We place all of our clusters nodes in the same physical box, _including the
networking between them_. This allows us to ship the box to a datacenter and
all it needs is power, ethernet connections to the outside world, and
possibly, the assignment of static IP addresses. Any tech can install the
cluster in minutes.

We're not using the Atom processors though, we're using the lowest-power Xeon
E5 in our current design. The Atom S1200 looks interesting.

