

2010: The year of the microslice server - bbgm
http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/11/30/2010TheYearOfMicroSliceServers.aspx

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spamizbad
The biggest take-away for me is this gives you an oppertunity to (somewhat)
rebalance the performance equation of the server.

Currently, your typical dual-socket, quad/six core CPU, is quite top heavy:
LOTS of CPU performance, only a satisfactory amount of RAM bandwidth (and in
certain cases not limited by bandwidth but by the DRAM command rate), along
with piddling disk and network performance.

You could create a dual or quad-core ARM Cortex A-9 chip with a dual-channel
memory controller (more memory bandwidth/ops per degree of CPU performance),
dual or single gigE (more relative bandwidth per node), and finish it with a
single SSD (lots of IOPs). Since these nodes are fairly affordable (probably
$500) and relatively low power (probably 10-15 watts, you're left with nodes
that 1) offer 1/3rd the performance but are 1/5th the price and use 1/20th the
power 2) can be scaled cheaply and predictability, particularly as it pertains
to laying out your datacenter power and cooling infrastructure.

Also, for people who don't have complete control of their data center (they're
renting rack space), it eliminates a significant amount of headache finagling
your datacenter to provide enough amperage to your rack, and eliminates
surprise deficiencies in their cooling infrastructure.... lessons I've learned
the hard way. Micro-servers let you scale at a much more granular level so
that you aren't rolling out several kilowatts of servers at a time, and let
you avoid carrying excess capacity as you wait to grow-into it (only to
scramble to scale after you're full-up again)

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gojomo
An aside reminder to everyone whose system shows spare CPU and bottlenecked
IO: are you compressing everything you could?

It can be hard to get over the sense that always compressing and decompressing
_everything_ that goes to disk is wasteful. But available CPU cycles left
unused are marginally free and can't be stored us for use after the moment
passes. They should be "wasted" to achieve even a slight improvement in
overall throughput.

~~~
sp332
Unfortunately, the transparent compression built into WinXP and, I assume
(perhaps wrongly) in Vista and Win7, makes everything slower, even on a system
with lots of CPU and a slow disk.

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Tichy
This is so not my area of expertise. However, I wonder, wouldn't more small
servers imply more hardware failures? Exchanging one HD in a big server might
be less work than exchanging 10 HDs in small servers. Of course the HD in the
big server might take down more "applications", but I think that is taken care
of in other ways (hot swappable HDs, redundance?).

Overall I wonder if maybe a new OS for the cloud is called for? It seems
inefficient to have seperate VMs running full OS for every tiny application.
Maybe in the future not only storage will be a service (like S3), but also
CPUs and RAM could be plugged together at will? Like there wouldn't be lots of
small or big server instances, there would be farms of CPUs, farms of RAM,
farms of storage, that could be combined at will. Maybe networking would be
too much of a bottleneck, though :-/

~~~
wmf
The number of disks you have should be determined by your workload, not the
number of servers. Think of it more like 12 disks in a big server vs. one disk
in a small server -- the total number of disks (and disk failures) is the
same.

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alexgartrell
<http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fawnproj/>

tl;dr IO is the bottle-neck, not the CPU. So slow CPUs on lots of nodes gives
you more cost-effective (in terms of power costs) key-value lookups.

Of course, this makes layer-7 load balancing a huge problem, which is my own
little project in this world. More on that later :)

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skorgu
I'm hoping that these will shortly a) exist and b) be produced in enough
volume that they unit cost will come down to <$100 levels. I'd like to buy a
small, low-power cluster for hobbyist use but the current low-water mark is
about $200 plus memory (which is limited to 2G). Hopefully there would be some
standard on DC-DC distribution but that would just be gravy.

~~~
wmf
I doubt they'll be that micro; the optimal point looks closer to $500. Also,
the minimum order tends to be a full rack. You should look at mini-ITX boards.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
<$500 is totally doable. I'd ballpark retail for $350-$400 with an eventual
volume price point of $300. Specs looking something like:

Dual core atom processor 2 GB Ram (expandable to 4gb) Solid state disk for OS
Mini itx form factor

~~~
skorgu
That's pretty close to doable today:

Supermicro 1U 230 barebones chassis is $200
[http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101...](http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101263&cm_re=atom_supermicro-_-16-101-263-_-Product)

$50 for ram and <$100 on storage for a HDD or $200 for a small SSD. Bulk
prices would take that down by probably 10-20% today so you could probably do
this for $300 today. I believe Dell is selling systems like this as private
integrations just not retail, I'd imagine their costs are substantially lower.

Bump the CPU to a 330 or whatever, bump the ram sure but you're still talking
$300 when a normal 1U HP server is <$1k list and is vastly more bang for buck.
The cooling and power density arguments aren't going to be very persuasive
(IMO) unless the price is there as well, hence my hope for very low per-unit
costs, even if there are chassis/bladecenter components as part of the
package.

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Andys
Traditionally, Intel and its partners have prevented the microserver market
from taking off by limiting their Atom (and other low power) platforms to
small amounts of RAM, usually 2-4GB.

It sounds like they're finally willing to open this up and allow a decent
amount of ram (8GB and beyond) on low-power, tiny motherboards.

~~~
sketerpot
The upcoming ARM Cortex-A9 processor will own the microserver market if Intel
doesn't let Atom compete. So if this is coming, then it's coming no matter
what Intel does.

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jasonlbaptiste
I need to do more research, but you could build one of these for about
$200-$300 depending on volume. Assume that the storage would be an SSD
connected a larger storage block.

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jasonlbaptiste
The "netbooks of servers"?

