The explosive growth in cloud-based applications and big data analytics has presented some interesting challenges for servers designed for these data intensive environments. The three primary challenges for cloud servers typically are performance, scale, and maintainability.

A new product recently released by Kontron (News - Alert) called the SymKloud MS2900 is not just another ordinary server, but instead is targeted at solving the critical challenges of cloud-based applications. The product is certainly feature rich, but the four features that clearly distinguish the new MS2900 are its switching, load balancing, modularity, and reliability. This new platform takes the modularity and switching strengths from the ATCA standard and combines them with the lower profile and price of a standard 2U rack mount server.

The MS2900 has integrated switching up to layer 7 as well as node and cluster load balancing. The server is designed to meet NEBS Level 3 carrier grade environments with five 9's reliability. The server is also equipped with easy to maintain Easy 1-Click updates. 

The server is designed with complete modularity, but the unit does not sacrifice performance. With up to 24 TB of storage, eight Xeon processors, and up to eight servers in a cluster, the MS2900 is ready to handle large workloads. The symKloud MS2900's integrated switching, load balancing and processing in a 3-in-1 modular platform is well suited for cloud-based transcoding and content delivery infrastrucure applications. 

So what's the final score? The MS2900 appears to solve the key cloud server challenges in a well designed compact 2U modular form factor. If the price tag (News - Alert) to get all of these features in a modular server is reasonable, then this platform is really application ready.

Jeff Hudgins is vice president of marketing for UNICOM (News - Alert) Engineering (www.unicomengineering.com).