A few years back a number of 8-way servers based on Intel architectures came to market, only to be met with a collective shrug because most customers were not yet willing to give up their proprietary Unix/RISC systems.
But a lot can change in a few years, especially when it comes to the state of the economy and the performance capabilities of a new generation of 8-way servers. At least that's what the folks at Advanced Micro Devices are saying about their latest generation of Opteron processors.
The core argument, no pun intended, is that these processors allow vendors such as Hewlett-Packard to bring 64-bit systems to market that can scale up or out to meet the performance requirements of just about any database. As such, IT organizations have their first real opportunity to think about consolidating database servers a platform that costs substantially less than what most Oracle and IBM DB2 sites are using today.
Not everybody is necessarily going to agree that 8-way servers based on AMD processors are going to meet all their needs, but for most database applications these systems are probably going to be plenty good at a comparative price point that is hard to ignore.
Furthermore, the potential cost benefits to be derived from consolidating database servers adds another incentive to consider these systems at a time when IT organizations are under increasing cost pressures.
For the most part, database servers have escaped much of the consolidation wave because most of the focus has been on using virtual machine software to consolidate file servers. But virtual machine software adds processing overhead so using virtual machine software to consolidate performance-sensitive database servers has largely been avoided. But with the advent of powerful 8-way servers the opportunity to consolidate database servers even without the aid of virtualization is still a pretty compelling argument just based on the amount of power and space that can be saved.
All of this adds up to a significantly different scenario than when 8-way systems first came to market a few years back so don't be surprised if we all don't start hearing a lot more about database server consolidation in the months ahead.