Successfully Challenging the Server Tax

Perspectives (Sep 3 2009) Servers , Storage

1. The server tax is what I call the mark-up applied to servers, enterprise storage, and high scale networking gear.  Client equipment is sold in much higher volumes with more competition and, as a consequence, is priced far more competitively. Server gear, even when using many of the same components as client systems, comes at a significantly higher price. Volumes are lower, competition is less, and there are often many lock-in features that help maintain the server tax.  For example, server memory subsystems support Error Correcting Code (ECC) whereas most client systems do not. Ironically both are subject to many of the same memory faults and the cost of data corruption in a client before the data is sent to a server isn’t obviously less than the cost of that same data element being corrupted on the server. Nonetheless, server components typically have ECC while commodity client systems usually do ... (Read Full Article)

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