What you have and what you really need
Not all servers are built equal
There are many types of servers and they are built with different goals in mind. They can be classified into four categories of servers:
- Tower is a general purpose server for a stand alone use. They are usually not suitable for a growing business. They use up more space compared to all other types of servers.
- Rack is a server we usually know from movies where several of them are stacked into a tall rack. The can be U1, U2 sized. The U2 size can be easily expanded with additional disk space, specialized acceleration cards.
- Mission critical is the server specifically designed for certain tasks, like, large transaction database, business intelligence, or artificial intelligence. They have larger number of CPUs compared to the conventional servers, higher bandwidth of the inter-connection between nodes.
- High density is a server where a large number of the same devices are put together in a small space, e.g. high density storage server.
Since the mission critical and high density servers are suitable only for a small fraction of businesses we do not cover them here.
The tower servers use physical space inefficiently. Moreover, the temperature management of the room with a few servers can be more challenging than the room of racks. Most data centers use rack servers stacked up in groups. The cable, power and air-flow management is much easier and efficient for rack servers. The server maintenance, e.g. expanding or replacing parts is also much easier for rack servers.
The most U1 rack servers are one-socket servers. In other words, they have only one CPU inside. They offer a cost-effective solution for a single system. But because of the single CPU they have limited memory expansion. And most U2 rack servers are two-socket servers. They offer feature reach systems for demanding workloads. They offer much larger memory, larger GPU expansion.
Virtualization or no virtualization
At this point assume we have selected the server the most suitable for your task. This is not the end of the story. There are three choices you can have depending on the level of customization you want:
- Bare metal is when you own the entire physical server. You can install specialized and dedicated devices. For example, FPGA cards for video streaming.
- Instance of the virtual machine is when you co-share the physical server with other users, although they do not have access to your system. Nowadays the virtualization is supported by the CPU manufacturers and the functionality is part of the operating system, like Linux. There is little overhead maintaining the virtualization. But still it is slightly slower than having the system on the bare metal.
- Container is the most simplified unit of environment which is capable of executing some tasks. They share the operating system and some common libraries with other containers. Thus it is resource efficient. This is suitable for most common tasks today.
The capabilities of the cloud infrastructure allow a dynamic and quick reconfiguration of servers from bare metal to virtual machine instances. For critical tasks where 5% gain can be advantageous renting the bare metal can be the best option given the short term rental plan. If the solution relies on a process which is executed for a short period of time and the timing is not very critical, e.g. processing the collected data, or data transformation, than the container is the most suitable solution. As we can see it does depend on the taks at hand to determine the most suitable solution.
Time to act
If you already have own a server, a virtual machine or a container you probably want to know if it is the most suitable solution for you. Just drop us an email and we will advise you for free.
If you don't have a solution and thinking of getting one, we can advise you for free even if you don't buy the service from us.
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