Servers: From Specialty to Commodity

There was a time when a PC used to cost Rs 80,000 upwards. There was a time when IT mangers had to fight hard to get an approval to buy a modem, because it used to cost the moon. Today, you hear of PCs for a mere 10K. I remember our manager having the same debates when we wanted to buy our first 14.4 Kbps modem way back in 1996, because its cost was 95K and it had to be specially imported from Singapore. Today, modems ship by default with just about every PC. If they don't, then you can pick one up from the local market for as little as Rs 300. Similarly, inkjet printers used to cost in excess of 20K, and the chief designer of the company had to approve its purchase. Today, every household that has a PC can buy an inkjet, and many PC vendors promote 'buy our PC and get an inkjet printer free' offers. Yet, during those days, all these items were terribly expensive, and had to be put up as capital expenditure. Today, they're all commodity items. You don't need much of an approval to buy them, unless you're buying in hundreds or thousands. One of the toughest products to get an approval for was the server, because it was a highly specialized device meant for 24x7 operation. It was the echelon of technology; something that the entire organization was dependant on. There used to be heated debates over choosing the right configuration, and you had to know your technology inside out to win them. The reasons for this were fairly evident. The technology was fairly new, the number of server vendors was few, and the prices were high. Even the most basic pedestal server used to cost several lakhs. What's happening today? It seems that this symbol of supreme engineering is also becoming another commodity item. 

Anil Chopra, Associate Editor

Once again, the reasons for this are fairly self-evident. There's nothing earth-shaking about the technology because every other server has it. In fact, you can probably build one on your own if you're adventurous enough because all of its parts are easily available in the market. Like wise, it can't boast of superior performance, because the same components are available today in PCs. An ordinary PC motherboard that costs 5K today supports onboard RAID, supports a dual core CPU, and can take up to 2 to 4 GB RAM. Storage isn't a problem either, because hard drives have reached half Terabyte capacity.

Moreover, smaller organizations are using ordinary PCs as a file server, Internet gateway, proxy server, or anything else. Larger organizations can put together ordinary machines in a cluster and build a super computer that can be used for their business applications. For instance, NSE.IT built a super computer using ordinary Xeon-based servers for their risk

management system in derivatives training. Had they tried buying a commercial super computer for the job, it would have cost

them a bomb. In fact, in this issue, we've ourselves created a cluster of 20 PCs connected over a Gigabit Ethernet LAN, which can do wonders. In the olden days, such clusters used to cost an arm and leg and everything else in between to build.

One might argue that servers still use many technologies that PCs don't have such as, redundant elements for backup, power supply, network, etc. They use hot-swappable elements such as RAM, hard drive, and even CPU. They use IPMI or Intelligent Platform Management Interface, which we've talked about in the Tech & Trends section in this issue. One could take all these arguments, but then every other server vendor provides these features today. Servers are no longer the domain of a handful of vendors only. Today, you can go to an ordinary system integrator and buy a server, and you'll even get a choice of a pedestal, rack mounted, or blade server. As it's widely available, there's healthy competition in the market, which has brought the costs down. For instance, the Dell Power Edge server we reviewed this month costs less than 80K. If you go to a system integrator, you might even get a better bargain than this. 

While all this might be painting a sad picture, but actually it isn't. The good thing is that technology that used to be so expensive has become quite affordable. This gives companies, both small and large equal opportunity to use technology for improving their business. So where's the differentiation? Like the other products we talked about, this seems to be happening in the features offered, the price, and support. They're all aimed at making the server easier to use, deploy, and manage.

Vendors even use the help of benchmark results to portray the capabilities of their servers. We've talked about that in this issue. 

All this doesn't mean of course that it's the end of life for servers. There's still tremendous work happening in this area, but besides technology, a lot of focus is also towards making them easier to manage, use, and deploy. Server virtualization, provisioning, and consolidation, for instance are three happening trends towards this goal. 

Anil Chopra, Associate Editor