infoneer-pulse:

The server market has experienced four phases of massive change over the last 25 years. Each time, the incumbent technology was replaced by “lesser” technology that offered to get the job done reasonably well but for a fraction of the price. Mainframes were replaced by minicomputers, which were replaced by UNIX servers, which are now being pushed out by x86 servers. It won’t stop there. The cost of energy and space requirements for data centers now approaches or exceeds the cost of the server and networking hardware itself. When you have 20,000, 50,000, or even hundreds of thousands of servers, a power guzzling data center quickly becomes a barrier to business innovation and a significant cost hurdle for the business to clear. Green now means more than good stewardship and social responsibility. Green means big dollars and Euros.

ARM-based servers will consume a fraction of the power and space demanded by today’s most efficient servers. Performance per “core” will be lower, but clusters of these efficient nodes will consume perhaps as little as 1/10th as much power to deliver comparable performance. Couple that with huge gains in performance density to realize massive savings potential in data center capital expenditures. Conventional wisdom in data center planning will undergo a rethink.

» via GigaOM