What excites you about servers and the future of server technology?

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Pri

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Jul 30, 2014
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I thought this would be an interesting discussion as we are all enthusiasts here for server stuff.

For me I'm most excited about virtualization. I like how hardware is becoming more of a commodity like RAM sticks and things are being defined in software. Routers, Switches, Disk Controllers. It's all being implemented through software and a lot of it as virtualized appliances.

What gets you excited about Servers or the future of the server industry?
 
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Mike

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May 29, 2012
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The move away from full virtualisation with lighter alternatives and alternatives like ARM coming up, in time.
 
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Pri

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Are you referring to servers like HP's Moonshot that uses lots of smaller nodes a mix of x86 and ARM nodes? That interests me a lot too!
 

Patrick

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I really like this thread. I am going to hold off a bit since I do not want to influence thoughts.
 

PigLover

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I'm most excited by technology that is just enough better to cause the big hoster's to refresh their racks...flooding eBay with cost effective near-current used equipment :)

Kidding, of course! For me it is highly capable low-power servers operating in federated configurations. Moonshot is a good example, but that is just the tip of the iceberg on what is coming.
 
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HellDiverUK

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Cheaper, bigger flash memory.

Who else wants to see a NUC-sized device with 4x M.2 slots? I could see a decent little server running in 4" square form factor with 4TB flash storage, quad cores, using less than 1oW. Everything is there, 1TB SSD cards are available, there's decent SoCs, just waiting for someone to put them together.

As it is, a DN2820 with a Samsung M9T 2TB drive and 8GB RAM can run as a perfectly good home server running Server 2012R2. I've tried it, it ran perfectly. :)
 

Marsh

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Let me start by introducing myself. I am 59 years old , retired since year 2000.

Back in the dark age, 1990-2000, I had worked and invested in a few startup ventures. It would require $100k to $500k to bring a software project from prototype to beta in order to acquire first round of funding.
Today, one could self-fund with one or two credit card, although it is high risk. Technology enable us to dream big.
 
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Patrick

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I was going to post this tomorrow/ this weekend, but just got the new NVMe driver for the DC P3700 installed. Here is the default Windows Server 2012 R2 driver at work on the "small" 400GB model:


And the new drivers add a lot of performance.

This is one of the things I am excited about technology wise.
 
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cesmith9999

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Mar 26, 2013
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Part of what I am excited about. SSD's. they are already killing the 2.5" HD market. and with the new VNAND will probably start killing the large 3.5" drive market.

My next home server in a couple of years will probably be all SSD (mostly TLC since it is normally write once and read lots) ... less heat, noise and power. I am not really worried about having a NUC as a server (cool thought). Maybe a 16 bay all SSD Server... the size of a microserver.

For work. there is a lot of work I cannot talk about ... mostly more scale out and less scale up.
 

Stanza

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Jan 11, 2014
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Being more into storage hardware than vm type hardware.... I am more excited about cheap enterprise storage goodies than anything else.

The lower power / higher density the better to me.
 

Jeggs101

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For me its converged networking and storage. vSAN should be in every virtualization product. It'd be amazing if someone made a Linux based and virtualizable version of pfsense that combined ease of management with high performance DPDK.

Oh vyatta did that but now costs a lot.
 

HellDiverUK

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I'm thinking a Synology DS414Slim with 4x1TB SSDs would be totally sweet. 4TB of storage at sub-10W power use, and should be fit to run all your home media needs.
 

Chuntzu

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I'm with Patrick, nvme!!! I am glad to see that reaching 10s of gigabytes per second and millions of iops with extremely low latency and high reliability is at everyone's finger tips. I'm just waiting for competition to drop prices on nvme to create 40-80 lanes of pcie storage. In time cluster pcie storage just like SAS will be fantastic as well. Maybe we will see this in windows server 10?
 

Mike

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I'm thinking a Synology DS414Slim with 4x1TB SSDs would be totally sweet. 4TB of storage at sub-10W power use, and should be fit to run all your home media needs.
Although this is ofcourse nice to have, still, what is sub-10w power usage worth if your disks are spinned down all the time and your favorite movie is simply read in chunks of several GB and cached? I'm sort of afraid that with the higher density flash storage we will see a higher failure rate.
 

DolphinsDan

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Sep 17, 2013
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I'm with these trends. I'd like to see more on the low end and more NVMe clusters.

I'm also excited about servers. Eucalyptus install was really easy. It totally is a PITA once it is going though. I'm beyond confused as to why it doesn't have simple stuff like an image library that you can grab images from the https interface with. Someone will get that down though.

Oh and what about an ez version of openstack?
 

eva2000

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Apr 15, 2013
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Brisbane, Australia
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what excites me ? anything that gives us folks a better bang for your buck so to speak :D

SSD improvements is one such factor

Another would be improvements in MySQL scalability i.e. MySQL 5.7, WebScaleSQL and Mariadb 10.1 - MySQL performance has come a long way since MySQL 3.23.x era