Trend 4: Servers - Multicore, Big RAM, Flash memory

We are approaching another inflection point where the commodity components of servers are becoming cheap enough that alternative architectures become possible or necessary.

Ten years ago, most servers had one to eight CPUs, with a single core, and memory measured in single digit gigabytes. Disk drives were broadly simile, although smaller. Today's servers have up to eighty cores, low single digit terabytes of RAM and solid state storage far faster than any disk drive can possibly be.

Solid state storage appears in lieu of disk drives, in storage arrays, in cache cards in arrays, in PCI cards in servers, just about everywhere. The relative speeds and sizes of server components are shuffling, and new architectures will be tried, no single one seems dominant yet.

Today it's possible to buy 10 core processors and 32 GB memory DIMMs. A commodity server in 2013-5 will have multiple terabytes of RAM, close coupled flash storage, tens to hundreds of cores, with hardware virtualisation and be capable of running very different workloads to the gear we have today.

So. How best to exploit these things? VMware farms with Windows/Linux images maybe not be the best way, who knows?