Last week Andy Moon posted “Intel and AMD chase the upgrade cycle” and how both companies plan to drive the server upgrade cycles this year. Intel’s new Xeon 5600 line touts a 5 month ROI and a 15 to 1 consolidation estimate. AMD, on the other hand, wants to bring 4 processor servers to the masses by lowering the cost. This week John Fruehe – Director of Product Marketing for Server/Workstation products at AMD – blogged that AMD has eliminated the “4P tax” or the premium users had to fork over for 4 processor scalability with the launch of the AMD Opteron 6000 Series….”signaling a new era of server value”, according to their press release.
What strategy will win? Intel’s touting performance and ROI, or AMD’s overall value position? What strategy makes most sense for your business?
A server refresh push is a good thing for hard drives. On the one hand, the 4P for the masses strategy ultimately means more net new servers. On the other, 15:1 consolidation means less net new servers, but a heck of a lot of processing power. How really does the number of net new servers deployed impact storage? Sure, net new server sales equals net new enterprise drive sales, but moreso, net new server sales means more processing power, which means more data generated, collected, stored, shared … and that means more high capacity storage arrays. Remember…from my last post… the faster we create, the more we consume… that infinite loop thing.
Bring on the server refresh Intel and AMD… you have a neutral ally in the drive guys.
Who’s strategy suits your server needs?
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