Web

A Solid Web of Growth

As more and more applications and services move into the cloud (be it public or private), growth and demand for efficient web servers will increase at a rate faster than any other type of compute infrastructure. Some estimates predict that by 2016, more than 40% of all servers within a hyper-scale datacenter will be powering some form of a web server. Whether hosting actual websites, or powering some form of web-services (APIs that use the web’s HTTP protocol), the flexibility, simplicity, and pervasiveness of web-based applications will continue to spur demand for web servers within tight IT budgets.

Growing Pains

With this growth comes challenges. Today’s web servers are designed with high-performance, power-hungry platforms, that unfortunately are often constrained by other bottlenecks within the infrastructure (such as the network). Many of the standard 1U and 2U “pizza boxes” built for this workload end up artificially limiting their performance capacity because of the lack of (or cost prohibitiveness) of multiple network ports per server. Some companies have turned to virtualization and focused their efforts on consolidating web servers to maximize their resource utilization. But larger, hyper-scale datacenters shy away from virtualizing their extremely scaled-out web tiers to avoid additional costs and complexity, leaving them with few choices but to live with the status quo.

Building a Balanced Web Server

With Calxeda’s innovative approach at finding the right balance between CPU performance and network I/O, system partners can now offer highly efficient web servers that consume significantly less energy without sacrificing the performance needed for handling high volume websites. Combined with new density optimized designs, hyper-scale datacenters finally have the option of web servers that provide a dramatically lower TCO. Don’t live with the status quo. Join the revolution, and ARM your web servers today!