Get ready for component servers

One of the trends I caught up with at last week's Gartner Symposium was a move away from general-purpose servers, which have become something of a commodity. Intel has made it easy for vendors to turn out standard, high-volume servers at attractive prices. Yet while these general-purpose servers are designed to perform a range of tasks, they are masters of none.

However, new special-purpose servers are springing up to fill new niches in the network ecosystem. These devices are designed from the ground up for one specific role, which might be to server up Web pages, video streams, or secure content, or to act as a back-end database engine, among other purposes. In these roles, they become, in effect, components in the network infrastructure.

Expect this trend to continue. Why? Because it no longer makes sense to centralize all your computing power on a few machines.

Component servers are even cheaper than their general-purpose brethren. Because their roles are limited, there's less that can go wrong with them, which balances out their greater numbers in the ease-of-management equation. And component servers can't be a potentially expensive single point of failure. If one dies, it's fairly easy and cheap to swap in an entire replacement.

How do you buy component servers? Specify in your RFP the characteristics you want, in terms of data rates, scalability, and service profiles. Let the vendors show you how they can meet your needs.

As you plan for future server purchases, bear in mind that while many of your servers today are constrained by bandwidth limitations, more organizations are rolling out faster network pipes. At the same time, more rich media content (audio and video) is making its way out of many organizations. Thus, it's becoming more important to use top-end CPUs in servers, to include fast disk subsystems, and to implement sensible caching.

Plan now to roll out the right server for any given niche--one that reduces the time it takes for data to make its way in and out of your organization.

Extra: With all you have on your plate, you may have missed this milestone: the first successful implementation of RFC 1149, a.k.a. Internet Protocol over avian carriers. Researchers in Bergen, Norway, got ping reply times ranging from 3,211 to 6,389 seconds (that is, when the pigeons carrying the packets didn't go astray). Don't try this in your computer room.

What's your organization's server strategy? Talk Back below. Lee Schlesinger is executive editor of ZDNet's Business & Technology Channel.