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Virtualisation has drawn many changes to the way servers, back room applications and services are implemented today.

With downright new wave, hypervisor solutions from companies like VMWare and Citrix, the landscape of servers and the way they are designed to serve us has been completely transformed.

Say if you invest in a piece of server hardware and pays RM50.00 a month to feed 24 x7 electricity power to it, chances is that you will only utilise 10% to 20% of its resources with traditional single OS and single app installation.

Virtualisation changed all that and makes hardware computing practical; by implementing virtualisation in the core OS of servers, many other guest OS can be installed and used from within, thus maximising utility of the hardware resources and electricity consumption.

But what if the situation insists that multiple servers are required and you are caught with minimum space provided by your dedicated server hosting company? And with its range of new products known as half-size server boards, Asus may have the solution to all sorts of cramp dilemmas.

For instance, half size boards allow us to implement 2 physical server hardware in a single 1U server rack chassis. Now, why would anyone do this? To save money, of course.

Hosting companies charge dedicated co-location services based on the amount of space required. Rates are calculated based on the height of the electronic modules, which is also standardised as multiples of 1.75 inches (44.5 mm) or one rack unit or “U”. As an example, annual co-location charges for 1U and 6U therefore can be quite significant.

With half-size serverboards you can save money on your annual costs without sacrificing on server power. If you are paying RM8,000.00 monthly for a full 42U rack space, you can potentially save up to RM48,000.00 a year by implementing a full migration to half-size server boards. That’s a lot of cash if the servers are hosted on long term contracts.

Currently Asus have 3 models in their stable, the Intel based Z8PH-D12, the lower end Intel based Z8NH-D12 and the AMD based KGMH-D16. All models are dual processor capable with up to 16 DIMM slots. That’s a whopping 256GB RAM size if you decide to max it out.

On the storage side, up to 4 SATA II drives is supported and its embedded RAID solution is from LSI’s MegaRAID. A combination of SAS drives can also be used by installing additional RAID cards.

These Asus half-size boards are designed to fit into 1U and you can have two boards inside one chassis.

One of the immediate application for these boards is the popular network design approach where routing and service apps are hosted separately on 2 different servers to prevent tedious troubleshooting in the event there’s hardware failure occuring.

Or if you are running shared web hosting services, these half-size boards can bring about convincing benefits by reducing your monthly overheads to maintain your pool of servers online.

And if your organisation is in the process of going cloud, the Asus half-size boards are a must in your checklist. Coupled with software hypervisor and clustering technology, these modern server products could possibly stretch your design plans further by simply letting you do more in less space.

Similar to virtualisation that allows multiple OS to co-exist in a single platform, the Asus half-size server boards allows multiple servers to co-exist in a single chassis. Virtualisation might be given an additional definition very soon.