There has always been a tension in the datacenter between ever-advancing technology and the practical economic gravity of the company balance sheet.
All things being equal, some IT decision makers would be happy for servers to be used until they fail in the field, extending their useful life well beyond their economic life. Technologists, who are always eager to get the shiniest new gear to provide the best platform on which to run the company’s hundreds to thousands of applications and their databases and file systems, would probably prefer to be on a two year cadence that matches the server upgrade cycle at their OEM suppliers.
The correct cadence is somewhere in the middle. And in the past year and a half, with so much of the focus in the datacenter being on accelerated computing and generative AI, less attention has been paid to the much larger fleet of iron that is actually running the businesses of the world. Several million servers across enterprises of all sizes and industries are looking a little bit rusty, and there are several million more that need to be replaced for economic as well as technical reasons.
To take the pulse of the state of datacenter hardware and to try to figure out what the appropriate strategies are for modernizing those core infrastructure systems, we sat down with Robert Hormuth, who is in charge of architecture and strategy for the Data Center Solutions Group at AMD. Like us, Hormuth believes that we are at the cusp of a big upgrade cycle in the datacenter – and that this time, it has nothing at all to do with AI, but rather getting the oldest portions of the server fleet replaced with much more powerful servers – machinery that is much more energy efficient relative to the work it can do.
The server consolidation ratios that you can get today by moving to new iron are pretty big, as AMD pointed out in this chart:
Generally, if you compare 4th Gen AMD EPYC CPU-powered servers to even older servers using Intel “Cascade Lake” Xeon 8200s and “Skylake” Xeon 8100s, the server compression ratios can get even higher and the power consumption and TCO gaps can also get even larger. And in Europe, where electricity can be two or three times as expensive as in the United States, it is not hard to get math that shows replacing these older vintage systems will result in the TCO savings actually paying for the new machinery.
To learn more about AMD’s strategy for datacenter modernization, check out the video above.