Future Energy Efficient Enterprise Storage Servers

When I was finishing my last post, another thought came to my mind. If 30% of data centre energy bill goes to Storage and Servers and half of that are consumed only by storage, we still have a large expense head to target. Present Intel Xeon or x-86 based processors that most enterprise servers use today are quite power hungry. Given that processors are the biggest power consumers in server hardware, should we not be looking at making them more energy efficient?
ARM enjoys today as the de-facto processor design for all energy sensitive segment, particularly miniature and consumer devices such as smartphone. Intel brought up ATOM processor based on ARM design but somehow the server industry stayed away from ATOM. Traditionally Server work profile used to be considered too heavy for ARM-based processor. But the trend is changing slowly. Since ARM is inherently lot more power efficient, there is an interest to use cluster of ARM core processors to replace more powerful Intel variants. Baidu, the Chinese Google [search] equivalent announced that it has deployed ARM based processor from Marvell for its storage servers. The particular version that Baidu is using is known to be Marvell's 1.6GHz quad-core Armada processor, that Marvell launched in 2010. However, AMD and some semiconductor startups like Calxeda also are trying to bring a 64-bit version for the storage server market. In last 3-4 years most of the storage vendors have moved to (mostly Intel-based) 64-bit processors for their enterprise servers. So, it is quite obvious that for them to seriously consider a ARM-based processor, they would need at least a 64-bit version. Taking cognizance of this need, ARM has already announced to bring out two new core designs. Last October, ARM unveiled its 64 bit Cortex A-50 server processor. ZDNET reports that this design is already licensed by AMD, Broadcom, Calxeda, HiSilicon, Samsung and STMicroelectronics. AMD announced that their first ARM based server CPU is targeted for production in 2014.

AMD Bridges the X86 and ARM Ecosystems for the Data Center from AMD

 At this point, it is not clear if Intel's response would be another version of ATOM or Xeon. Storage vendors who adopted Xeon in their storage controllers definitely would like if Intel makes Xeon more energy efficient. But we sure can expect the data centres to be lot more energy efficient compared to their present versions.