you are correct, margins are very thin in hosting company business and the absolute most server performance/number of nodes for the least money is very important.

have been on the manufacturing side of this before.

bulk x86-64 servers such as you could buy from the vendors you meet at the computex taipei are a big part of it.

things along the same general idea as the supermicro that is 2U high and has four discrete nodes in it, but cheaper.

long/narrow motherboards with dual socket xeons

and other similar stuff...

if the price for this is not market competitive with that, or just a bunch of 1U commodity dual socket servers, the only people buying it will be enterprise/specialty end user and not hosting operations.

As I understand it, this isn't really a premium product in that sense.

What they seem to want to do is give you what a rack (or 2) full of Dell Servers plus the price of a VMWare license would give you.

And then you should also save money on maintenance, space, updates, compliance and so on.

If the approach to firmware and virtualization means you can have just 1/2 employ less then that's already a huge amount of money.

Does “premium over a typical x86 server” mean a premium over the cheapest servers you can find or a premium over servers sold by (e.g.) Dell?