The Era of MicroServers is upon us. MicroServers will radically change the computing landscape much like mini-computers did when they first came on the scene. People and organizations will be able to do more computing while consuming less energy in very small form factors. It is only up to the imagination what can be accomplished with these new systems.

1. The Era of
Energy-Efficient
MicroServers
by
Paul Morse
6/24/2012

2. The Era of Energy-Efficient MicroServers Paul Morse
INTRODUCTION
The era of MicroServer technology is upon us and is about to begin in earnest. Estimates of
adoption between now and 2015 vary, but are as high as a 49% compound growth rate for
MicroServer adoption and reaching 15% of all Server systems sold. The combination of super
energy-efficiency and more than adequate processing power for a wide variety of uses is
providing an excellent value proposition for adopting MicroServers. This paper looks at some
background for the momentum of MicroServers and explores some new applications of this up
and coming form of computing platform.
WHAT IS A MICROSERVER?
As with many product types in the computing realm, there are huge vendor marketing teams
that want to define technologies and their uses so the definition will be beneficial to the vendor.
MicroServers seem to be following that same trajectory of definition with even Wikipedia lagging
behind this fast moving technology sector. Most of the recent press about MicroServers is
around HyperScale computing and large compute farms for cloud and Big Data
implementations. MicroServers are certainly used in those roles, but if we define the term
MicroServer as any Server computing platform that is extremely energy-efficient and can run
traditional workloads with ease, then the realm of MicroServers is extended significantly. Using
those guidelines we would have to include the new generation of powerful, energy-efficient
Desktop Server solutions into the overall definition of MicroServer.
MICROSERVERS WILL CHANGE COMPUTING
That is a pretty bold statement, but if very capable servers the size of a book can handle tens of
thousands of users and run on 12 Volts, or less, then new architectures and uses for portable,
high capacity computing will start to be developed and enter the mainstream. The concept of
having an easily expandable miniature data center on your desk, or in your car, or in your home,
or in the middle of nowhere being run by solar or wind power and is reasonably priced changes
the landscape of computing. “Data Center” ownership for the common person begins to emerge.
Many will run cloud software and there will be departmental and classroom clouds, completely
personal clouds and many other types of applications, including High Performance Computing
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3. The Era of Energy-Efficient MicroServers Paul Morse
and big data solutions. Imagine a multi-node, multi-terabyte Hadoop or Cassandra cluster
quietly running on your desk at home. That is possible today.
The first examples of this new type of system are the US Micro PC, CriKit MicroServer and the
CriKit Desktop Private Cloud that is built with CriKit MicroServers as its main compute engine.
Organizations can now implement a multi-node cloud infrastructure on a desk and use less than
1,000 Watts of electricity for the entire computing complex. This was not possible in a mass
commercial context even 2 years ago. The technology that enables this type of solution to be
easily built was not available.
THE TRAJECTORY OF COMPUTING POWER OVER TIME
Moore’s law has been through many iterations and with each one computing has changed a
little bit. However, with multiple cores and threads and innovation to reduce electrical
consumption, the computing industry is at an inflection point. It’s been estimated that single,
low-wattage processors that can address even moderate amounts of RAM and use Solid State
Disks are nearly the application throughput equivalent of an 8 way server in 2000. I contend
modern systems are more powerful today because inter-processor communication was not very
efficient at that time. As an example, let’s look at a normalized graph of the single processor
submissions to the Transaction Processing Council (TPC) from 2000 to 2010.
300000
250000
200000
150000
100000
50000
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Figure 1 – Single Processor TPC submissions - Source: http://ww.tpc.org
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4. The Era of Energy-Efficient MicroServers Paul Morse
The latest single processor submission reached 290,000 Transactions per Minute. This was
done with a 6 core, 12 thread processor, but how many organizations need 290,000
transactions per minute? A system that is 1/10 as capable could theoretically do 29,000
transactions per minute. How many organizations even need that many transactions? The point
is single processor MicroServers have entered high transaction rate territory and they are only
getting more capable as time goes on.
Further, as shown by this second graph, the cost per transaction of single processor TPC
submissions is declining rapidly. And again, this trend will continue.
5.00
4.00
3.00
2.00
1.00
0.00
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Figure 2 – Diminishing Cost Per Transaction
In addition, the energy needed to produce these results is also declining. The net here is that
single processor solutions are getting significantly more powerful, while the costs and energy
required to provide the value in the solution are decreasing. This is very good news for
implementers of computing solutions that are also charged with lowering the carbon footprint
associated with the computing environment. Further, MicroServers are at the vanguard of these
very advantageous trends.
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5. The Era of Energy-Efficient MicroServers Paul Morse
WHY NOT JUST USE THE PUBLIC CLOUD?
That is a question many people ask and there are several perspectives to the answer. It seems
the universe of computing solutions continues to expand and there is a lot of room for a wide
variety of approaches to solve the same problem. Desktop MicroServers fit in a unique, but
expanding space. Relative to Public Cloud, solutions built on Desktop MicroServers can be
architected to be standalone solutions or Hybrid Cloud solutions. In the context of being directly
competitive to Public Cloud, a CriKit MicroServer is the rough compute equivalent to an Extra
Large Instance in Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. The approximate cost for an Extra
Large instance in those solutions is $20.00, plus bandwidth, storage and possibly transactions
per day. If the MicroServer costs $2,500.00, the ROI period is probably less than 100 days
depending on the type of solution being created. And you own the MicroServer, and it is on-
premise which means things happen a lot faster, and there is no opportunity for a Cloud Bill that
is a complete surprise to the user.
For certain types of projects, public clouds simply don’t work. For example, if you are in an
organization that uses Xen, ESXi and Hyper-V and you need to test a software management
solution that claims to manage all three, there is really no way to test that with the major public
cloud providers. You would need to run all three hypervisor environments simultaneously and
test the management software. Desktop MicroServers are a perfect solution for that specific
situation. There are many other situations around software development, testing and training
that are easily enabled by flexible MicroServers where it would be difficult and time and
resource consumptive to do them in a public cloud.
THE TIME TO ACT IS NOW
If it were 1970 and someone walked into NASA with a CriKit MicroServer, they would either be
thought an alien or they would be locked up for being insane, or both. After having presented
and demoed the CriKit MicroServer and CriKit Desktop Private Cloud to many very enthusiastic
technologists, I can only say that there is an element of disbelief. The compute nodes simply
seem too small to be as powerful as they are. In my opinion, this will be a main hurdle to
adoption of these very capable computing platforms. The subconscious sentiment seems to be,
this computer, the size and weight of a Chemistry text book, simply can’t be as powerful as I
have witnessed. They see it and still don’t internalize it. Time and testing and successful proof
of concepts will slowly change that mind-set. The compute power and the energy-savings are
very real and super advantageous to organizations of all sizes. MicroServer experimentation
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6. The Era of Energy-Efficient MicroServers Paul Morse
must begin now to accelerate the reaping of the eventual benefits of this new computing
technology.
OTHER USES OF MICROSERVERS
Bill Gates once said something about how companies will eventually give away hardware to sell
software. With inexpensive, portable MicroServers we are in the final step of that becoming a
reality. Think about it. An organization can significantly compress the sales cycle if they can
walk in the door with some number of MicroServers fully loaded with their complex software and
show it to the prospect or even configure it for their environment and leave it on site for some
period of time. Further, it would be interesting if organizations kept MicroServers on site so
vendors could come in and configure their software for a tailored demo to that specific
customer. Organizations would be better able to evaluate vendor offerings by seeing them in
action on-site and the cost for the MicroServers is negligible compared to the value of being
able to evaluate the product without assigning significant IT resources. This type of scenario
could become Standard Operating Procedure across the industry.
Also, the concept of a portable, solar or wind powered Mini-DataCenter is very intriguing. How
can they be configured with wireless routers to enable truly remote classrooms, or data
collection at inoculation sites in Africa, or rapid response firefighting teams where there is no
cellular signal access. What would you do with a multi-node, Mini-DataCenter that sits on a desk
and draws less than 1,000 Watts of electricity? In the West, we take computing and continuous
electricity for granted, but in a large percentage of the world, those things are luxuries and
sometimes non-existent. Solar or wind powered MicroServers will enable a whole new
generation of solutions in places where learning and using computing has only been a dream.
CONCLUSION
Recently, HP and Intel provided a press release where they said people should take
MicroServers seriously. That was sage advice. The advantages of MicroServers are significant
both for new workloads and for migrating and consolidating workloads off of much less energy-
efficient servers on to low-wattage MicroServers. The MicroServer era has just begun and it will
offer many benefits to organizations and to the environment. You should begin your
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7. The Era of Energy-Efficient MicroServers Paul Morse
investigation and adoption of MicroServers today and learn how they can help reduce electrical
consumption and lower an organization’s carbon footprint.
http://www.crikit.info
http://www.cloudademia.com
http://www.usmicro.com
http://www.tpc.org
© 2012 Paul Morse
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