This white paper looks at ongoing customer requirements for server platforms and a number of pain points that have developed in recent years, as computer systems have become packed more densely within the datacenter. Power and cooling costs have risen at four times the growth rate of the actual costs of acquiring the servers themselves — and management costs have grown at eight times the acquisitionprice growth rate. Beyond that, the sheer number of server footprints has multiplied so quickly that the overall solution has become too complex to manage easily or costeffectively. Cabling for rack-optimized servers has also become tangled —figuratively and literally — meaning that any reduction in cabling would also improve
operational efficiency.