I Want You For My Server Survey

Virtualization. As in, how important are the virtualizationcapabilities of the server? Mostly, this is a software-sideimplementation issue, but it relates to the hardware in terms of itsprocessing power as well as how many cores and sockets are on themotherboard. (Every physical core can be virtualized into an additionalN logical processors.)

Power and Cooling. How big an imperative is it to save electricity? How heavily are your facilities people leaning on you?

Consolidation. How does the need for extracting efficiencies--akareducing box count factor and saving operational costs--factor intoyour acquisition decisions? (This obviously overlaps with the power andcooling question.)

Processor architectures. The big battle here is Intel (Nehalem,Westmere) versus AMD (Opteron Istanbul). I've neglected the high-endRISC architectures such as Itanium and UltraSparc; those obviously havea place, too.

Storage and Networking capabilities. Support for 10-GB Ethernet. Fast I/O out to storage and flexibility in connecting to SANs.

Management Software features. Importance of the automated ability to discover, allocate, and manage resources.

Server mix in your data center. What's the distribution of commodity, mid-range, and high-end systems?

Memory config. Given the drive towards virtualization, what's the sweetspot for memory? The assumption is that everyone's specifying a lotmore than they used to.

Where does the server buy fit, in relation to a complete data-centerarchitecture? Many vendors now are positioning their boxes as part of aholistic, converged architecture. I often wonder, the good things aboutthis approach notwithstanding, whether this sometimes makes it moredifficult to parse the particular merits of the processing portion ofthe equation.