With its lease about up on its midrange Sun Fire V880, the Applied Research Laboratory at The Pennsylvania State University was looking to cut costs and boost efficiencies. Initially, its plan was straightforward: move off the expensive Sun box and onto lower-priced Xeon-based Dell servers running Linux.

Today, however, the research lab is taking a second look at Sun and its new Opteron-based Galaxy servers. The servers, introduced last month, are the first x86 boxes designed by Sun engineers. Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim is leading the design team building the servers focused on high performance, better cooling and advanced manageability.

The Galaxy systems are the latest example of beefed-up x86 servers, giving users more choice when it comes to designing their data centers. The move from expensive, proprietary systems to less-expensive, standards-based servers is nothing new. But the trend for the last few years has been to cluster these low-end servers to provide the processing power needed to migrate important business applications from high-end systems. Today, the x86 servers themselves are providing more processing power, flexibility and manageability.

Enhanced virtualization

With features such as 64-bit support, enhanced virtualization capabilities and dual-core designs available from Intel and AMD, systems vendors are rolling out more-advanced x86-based servers.

IBM invested three years and $100 million into developing X3, a Xeon-based chipset that brings mainframe-type reliability and virtualization capabilities to standards-based systems. It began shipping servers based on the chipset earlier this year.

"Over the next year, I believe we'll start to see more boxes that have the kind of heavy-duty engineering, in terms of both box structure and packaging and power supplies and cooling, that people have been building around [Intel's 64-bit] Itanium starting to show up around Xeon and Opteron," says Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64.

Already, change is starting. A report issued by IDC in April, estimated that sales of volume servers - those priced below $25,000 - accounted for nearly half of the total worldwide server spending in 2004, up from 43% in 2003.

Major drivers

"The higher processing power and improved management capabilities and interfaces that compare with features formerly only available on higher-end systems are major drivers for growth across this much more modestly priced range of servers," the report says.