Industry Standard Servers (x86)

Universal or Tower Servers

Similar in layout to Tower PCs but typically larger with lots of expansion room internally for disk drives, memory and processors. Sometimes housed under a desk or more often on a shelf in a computer room. They can often be mounted sideways into a 19 inch rack by adding rack mounting rails. (Racks are large metal cabinets used to house multiple servers and other devices in computer rooms and data-centres. 19 inch refers to the standard width catering for devices from multiple vendors.)

Rack Optimised Servers

These are typically much lower in height than Tower servers – designed to make better use of the space available within 19 inch racks. The height is measured in Units or U – one U being 1.75 inches. The most popular formats are 1U and 2U.

Blade Servers

These slot into a proprietary blade chassis. The chassis itself is then installed into a standard 19 inch rack. Depending on the blade manufacturer, the chassis can house varying numbers of servers as well as other devices such as storage blades and networking switches. Blades offer the ultimate in rack density and by accommodating multiple devices connected by a neat backplane – cabling and device management can be simplified. All of this comes at a price which means blades are not right for every situation.

Business Value

• Cost Reduction. When compared to Unix or Mainframe servers - Industry Standard servers are much lower in cost. Despite this, Unix and Mainframe servers still have their place and architecturally do offer some advantages especially for larger organisations. However, it is the inherent cost advantage of Industry Standard servers that has caused their sales to overtake the rest.

  The reasons behind the cost advantage are: A) widely used components, many shared across the PC market which is huge compared to the server market. High volume drives down cost. B) Research and Development costs are spread across the entire PC market meaning the cost per unit is very low. C) Software providers can develop for a single, widely used platform, again reducing per unit costs. D) The standardised nature of these servers means high competition between providers which drives down costs.

• Despite being cost effective to buy, large numbers of servers can become costly to manage. There is a whole range of tools available to help organisations deploy, manage and eventually retire servers and their associated software.

• Servers can be under utilised - meaning processor power, storage and memory resources are being used wastefully. Consider server virtualisation to make better use of investments in server technology.

• The cheapest way to deploy storage (from a capital purchase point of view) is to simply put disks into servers. This can actually be false economy because the storage is hard to size correctly to take into account future needs. Storage utilisation in servers has proven to be low - perhaps an average of 30%. Shared or networked storage may be a better solution.