In 2020, the global outbreak of the epidemic has had a considerable impact on the shipments of the server market in the first half of the year. However, with the gradual control of the epidemic in the second half of the year and the surge in digital demand, the global server market has shown a very good growth trend.
At present, the server is still the foundation of digital transformation and the development of cloud computing, Internet and other technologies. The technology of the server directly affects the development speed of various industries.
So in the next 2021, what development trends will server technology show? Let's take a look at the following ten predictions about server technology:
1. Server as a service
With the development of technology, enterprise customers need to meet the needs of enterprise digital construction with the most advantageous price-performance ratio and the least start-up and maintenance costs while coping with limited budgets and traditional skill sets.
Server as a service or infrastructure as a service will be able to flexibly meet the needs of enterprises. How to provide flexible solutions and secure data protection and data management for the digital transformation of enterprises will be the focus of server development in the coming year.
2. Vertical areas become the focus
Customers are constantly looking for the most effective way from the infrastructure to provide the best products for the vertical and specialized fields.
The implementation of the hardware and software ecosystem and the accelerators in specific fields can meet the unique performance and functional requirements of vertical industries and be optimized for specific business scenarios. The competition in the vertical field will be a focus of the server vendors.
3. Speed up data processing
With the advent of the big data era, more data has appeared. Today, data transmission speed, data quantity, and data processing are still facing challenges.
Need to continue to adopt new accelerated processing speeds, while paying more attention to solving the challenges of the data life cycle. The integration of data management models, transmission methods, storage and security architectures and faster analysis will be the focus of the next server development.
4. The emergence of smart servers
The development of AI technology will simplify server management, deployment, and operation and maintenance. AI technology empowers servers, and smart servers may become an important development trend in the future.
AI operation and maintenance capabilities with system management will usher in the era of turning automatic tasks into automatic decision-making, and its implementation is manifested in the solution of system power loss and strategy consulting recommendation engines.
5. Software-defined hardware acceleration
The application architecture is constantly evolving. The traditional control plane and data plane are constantly moving towards separation. The control plane stays at the software layer, while the data plane is transferred to programmable hardware in the form of server add-on cards.
For example, it will allow bare metal servers + containerized applications + decomposed infrastructure software (network virtualization, storage virtualization, GPU virtualization, security services) to run together to create intent-based computing for customer workloads.
6. The edge server is really here
After several years of hype and popularization, we have seen that 5G has now begun to be commercially deployed, and will be followed by changes in communication infrastructure, remote management mode, and connection mode, which will affect the shape, size and function of the server .
As enterprises develop more edge infrastructure to handle the generation and influx of data, 5G will require customers to re-evaluate their edge connection infrastructure, and edge servers will receive more and more attention.
7. New server memory and storage mode
Nowadays, as the demand for in-memory computing and data storage increases, the industry is shifting from a traditional computing-centric architecture to a data-centric architecture, and this shift is driving a new server-connected memory and storage model in the IT industry.
Around the technology of persistent, encrypted and layered memory inside the server, and the technology of remotely accessing SCM and NVMe oF data through the new industry structure standard, innovative IT architecture is being created to achieve the best data security, expansion and preservation.
8. New technology of server to remote state
With the impact of 5G, the epidemic, and other aspects, office methods around the world are also changing. Telecommuting will become a mainstream in the future. Enterprises need to use remote work teams to support data center operations.
This transformation forces companies to evaluate new server technologies and assess resource requirements, which will emphasize the need to remotely use server functions around debugging, telemetry, and analysis to maintain business continuity.
9. The ecological war of server CPU
Today, we are seeing changes in the processor landscape, and we see Intel, AMD and Nvidia all making acquisitions to provide various support and acceleration for their respective product portfolios.
In the future, the real winners of server CPUs will be able to use their combination of silicon products and software libraries to form an integrated product "acceleration recipe" for workloads, thereby helping end customers optimize business results.
10. Safer standards
The security of the server is becoming the focus of user attention. The security surrounding server access and data protection has never been more challenging, so customers need server security to be quantified in order to measure the credibility of the infrastructure and identify digital risks.
Customers need to analyze the origins and functions of server products and new security technologies, as well as the threats to specific fields in the context of stricter supervision, in order to meet security requirements from the edge to the core to the cloud.
——END——