Re: Lovely for a micro server
Yep. Storage was really the last thing to be the bottleneck. Above that, you're going to be network-bound.
CPUs can go insane nowadays.
Memory can get ridiculous without being stupidly expensive.
Storage was either too small, too expensive or too slow. With the world moving to SSD and the things shrinking as fast as they are, you're only left with expense.
I have an IBM BladeCenter server next to me. It runs - and is kind of overkill - a large school. Almost on its own (backups, replicas and hot-spares aside). It's barely occupied in terms of blades, has only half the processors in each that they can take, each of which has only half as many cores as are possible, with RAM that's literally lost among the remaining empty RAM slots. The networking module is only 6 x 10Gb with LACP, but you can expand to all kinds of option more expensive options by just swapping out the module. Hell, you can even slot in several individual GPUs onto each blade for some stupendous GPU performance.
The integrated storage, however, is tiny (12Tb) for that job - only 2Tb per blade. And they don't have SSD options but if you did - in the same space as their disk storage modules, you could easily fit a Petabyte of storage into the same space using things like this, with speed and endurance comparable to the ludicrously-expensive drives in there now.
DIsk is really the bottleneck in terms of speed and capacity nowadays. I'm sure there are datacentres that are CPU-bound or network-bound or RAM-bound but in terms of almost everyone else from the tablets and desktop through to the high-end workstations and servers, is really storage.
SSD's need to come in M2 format throughout, allow you to slot dozens into a box, and have that box be the RAID card too. Physically, and in terms of bus speed, whatever you could squeeze in could more-than-handle anything you could throw at a decent sized server.
Roll on the death of spinning disks.