Servers Will Lead the Data Center Evolution

Young-Sae Song is Corporate Vice President of Product Marketing at Data Center Server Solutions for AMD. In this role, he leads the outbound marketing, branding, and demand generation functions for AMD’s push into next generation fabric based computing systems.

The last decade has seen the data center focus on a number of key technologies in order to improve efficiency. Since 2000, virtualization has been at the heart of increasing server utilization, allowing businesses to consolidate hardware and reap significant cuts in operating expenses. This was followed by a holistic focus on data center design, from the layout of suites to the efficiencies of HVAC and electricity supply. However, data center design will turn its focus on the server in order to make the next step to increase efficiency.

Data centers have always been evolving, from placement of cables 1 to the way servers are positioned in a rack to provide hot and cold aisles 2. In a bid to increase efficiency within the data center, the server has largely been overlooked in favor of low-hanging fruit, such as cooling infrastructure and on a macro scale, data center location.

Virtualization tapped unused resources and its popularity grew as processor performance gains mitigated the overhead of running a hypervisor. Servers are set to be the focus of the data center as virtualization expands from general compute to networking and storage, demanding more from hardware, alongside a need for increased density and improved manageability...