ITEC Connect has an article about facebook choosing to go with a microserver architecture instead of hordes of virtual servers. If so, that’s one major player bucking the trend. However, a microserver from a facebook perspective seems to have a lot of similarity with why people choose virtual servers:
- Easy to add resources
- Flexibility
- Plug and play when you swap a VM to a bigger machine
That said, when you get to mega-architectures like facebook where some VM concepts are invalidated, I can see why facebook would go with the microserver.
icroservers, a concept that Intel introduced in 2009, are small, low-power, one-processor servers that can be packed into a data center more densely than rack or blade servers. The microservers in a rack typically share power and cooling and may also share storage and network connections, said Boyd Davis, vice president of the Intel Architecture Group and general manager of data center group marketing.
Manufacturers including Dell, Seamicro and Tyan have adopted the architecture, which has been most popular among large cloud service providers for large-scale, low-end hosting and Web serving, according to Intel. The company expects microservers to remain about 10 percent of its server processor market.
