Microservers won’t kill virtualization

In an e-mail interview with ZDNet Asia, Lum Kong Joe, server platform marketing manager at Intel Asia-Pacific, said Web businesses and Internet service providers (ISPs) make up the early adopter segment for microservers. These players are evaluating microservers–diminutive low-power servers with reasonably good power–for applications such as low-end hosting, lightweight Web servers and simple content delivery servers, rack-based content delivery, very simple Web servers and low-end dedicated hosting, he noted.

In fact, social-networking giant Facebook has stepped forward to say that it prefers microservers over virtualization. According to reports, Gio Coglitore of Facebook Labs said at an Intel press event for microservers that the Internet company’s tests found that non-virtualized environments bring “efficiencies and the ability to scale much more effectively”. He added that Facebook would rather lose a server and not have the incident impact its service, but in a virtualized environment, the importance of a server is escalated.