RESEARCH PAPER: Single Socket Servers Are Disrupting The Server Market

By Matt Kimball, Patrick Moorhead - June 5, 2018
Dual socket servers – servers that ship with two “sockets” to support two centralprocessing units (CPUs) − are the mainstay of nearly every datacenter and server room. But walk through any server room or datacenter and slide three servers on their rails, pull off the cover and you will probably find at least one of those servers will be populated with only one CPU. And if you go to a console and run the performance monitor (PerfMon) utility against any server, you’ll more than likely see CPU utilization inthe 25% - 35% range. Advances in CPU microarchitectures and design have led to server platforms that can reach incredible performance levels. In many cases, compute power and resources are overmatched for the workloads supported. Even in large enterprise IT organizations, CPUs sit highly underutilized. This begs the question – why continue to deploy two socket servers if they are underutilized in your server room?
You can download the paper here.

Table Of Contents

  • Introduction
  • How We Got Here
  • Two Socket Performance, Single Socket Economics
  • AMD EPYC- The Foundation Of The HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen10
  • HPE ProLiant Democratizes Enterprise Class Performance
  • Where The HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen10 Shines
  • TCO Savings For The Mid-Market
  • Double Clicking On Software Licensing
  • Call To Action
  • Figure 1: AMD EPYC SoC Is At The Heart Of The HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen10
  • Figure 2: AMD EPYC Single Socket Product Lineup
  • Figure 3: HPE Silicon Root Of Trust - AMD Security Handshake
  • Figure 4: HPE ProLiant DL325 Gen10 Performance

Companies Cited

  • AMD
  • HPE
  • VMware
   
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Matt Kimball is a Moor Insights & Strategy senior datacenter analyst covering servers and storage. Matt’s 25 plus years of real-world experience in high tech spans from hardware to software as a product manager, product marketer, engineer and enterprise IT practitioner.  This experience has led to a firm conviction that the success of an offering lies, of course, in a profitable, unique and targeted offering, but most importantly in the ability to position and communicate it effectively to the target audience.

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Patrick founded the firm based on his real-world world technology experiences with the understanding of what he wasn’t getting from analysts and consultants. Ten years later, Patrick is ranked #1 among technology industry analysts in terms of “power” (ARInsights)  in “press citations” (Apollo Research). Moorhead is a contributor at Forbes and frequently appears on CNBC. He is a broad-based analyst covering a wide variety of topics including the cloud, enterprise SaaS, collaboration, client computing, and semiconductors. He has 30 years of experience including 15 years of executive experience at high tech companies (NCR, AT&T, Compaq, now HP, and AMD) leading strategy, product management, product marketing, and corporate marketing, including three industry board appointments.