8 Reasons Edge and Tower Servers Are Becoming Increasingly Popular in the Financial Sector
Published: 2024-07-11 06:10:30

Due to increased competition and the imperative need to innovate at a faster pace, the financial industry has embarked on proactively adopting enhanced forms of technology.

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Perhaps you have observed that fundamentally more financial organizations deploy modular edge servers and [**tower servers**](https://www.lenovo.com/ca/en/c/servers-storage/servers/towers/) over the industry standard rackmount server. What factors led to this trend?

This article offers eight compelling arguments to explain why edge and tower servers dominate the financial sector.

### 1. Space-Saving Builds Lead the Transformation

Finance and banking institutions are not the only ones that face limited office space in densely populated areas of cities. Although rack servers offer a lot of space, they can take up a lot of floor space or even floor area. This is where the edge and tower servers come in handy. These servers have also been designed to enhance space management since they occupy a very small space on the server floor. While they are small-form-factor solutions with integrated memory, networking, and just enough compute as needed for finance workloads.

- The benefits of edge and tower servers are not confined to their physical size and arrangement.
- They can be placed anywhere in the office space, under the desk, on the shelves or on the server racks.
- The microdesign helps in ensuring that there is efficient use of energy.
- Banks have an opportunity to become sustainable and reduce overall utility costs at the same time.
- Edge servers have other advantages for financial firms.
- Their construction concept allows for making necessary changes and repairs quickly without interrupting regular business activities.
- It also improves portability since it comes in a compact form factor.

Edge and tower servers constitute a compelling strategy for financial firms facing space challenges. Because they are microsystems that are flexible, energy conserving and easy to maintain, they are particularly suitable for the special needs of the financial services sector. In essence, these servers enable financial firms to maximize their use of office space, save on expenses, and streamline operations.

### 2. Sharpening the Reliability Concept with Edge and Tower Servers

The nature of financial transactions that happen every day requires strong foundations of financial systems to support millions of complex financial transactions. Rack servers offer reliability, but at the same time, they are not immune to having many single points of failure.

Edge servers redefine the market with embedded fail-safes and intrinsic reliability features that have not been previously seen. For example, power supplies, RAID storage and hot plug components are the provisions that help maintain operations. Hence, when any of the components have failed, it does not equate to system downtimes and hence no emergence of revenue losses.

### 3. Scalability Unplugged: Meeting Finance’s Diverse Workloads

While enterprise workloads are more conventional, heavy-duty ones, finance workloads are characterized by high peaks and valleys, which means that they need to scale quickly. What distinguishes rack servers from the others is that they scale vertically, and the addition of resources is a convoluted process that is time-consuming and disruptive.

Both tower and edge servers easily handle a horizontal scaling approach that can be added for bursts and can also serve as future requirements. It allows adding and upgrading processing cards, storage drives, memory, and I/O as needed to achieve performance and scalability to meet financial requirements.

### 4. Higher Agility Enables Better and Faster Deployment Methods

The speed at which financial markets operate means that flexibility of the infrastructure is necessary in order to exploit the opportunities. Rack servers have inflexible designs relative to enclosure designs, which make them more challenging to deploy.

Edge and tower servers reverse this with software-defined architectures that combine pre-integrated hardware and virtualization software. This also makes it possible to get to operating mode in as little as a few minutes, rather than days. Thus, financial institutions can quickly deploy new environments and applications or expand the existing ones for the purpose of accelerating innovation.

### 5. Enhanced Protection Offers Better Security for Sensitive Financial Information

Finance organizations deal with very sensitive information, which make issues of security and compliance vital. Though rack servers fulfill these criteria, cybercriminals are always coming up with new challenges requiring improved protection. [Edge servers](https://www.lenovo.com/ca/en/c/servers-storage/servers/edge/) incorporate diverse features, such as encrypted drives, secure boot, intrusion detection, and many more, into their systems. Alongside fast threat detection and response, financial information remains more secure on contemporary edge and tower-generation servers.

### 6. Less Cost of User Investments Helps Constrained IT Budgets

Rack servers are significant capital-intensive and costly equipment over useful life histories. Edge and tower servers upend these economics with substantially lower hardware costs and power consumption, which can cut TCO by as much as 40%. It also reduces the costly demands for space in data centers, something that is pretty tight with these tiny devices. Due to the cut in IT budgets, financial CIOs deem edge and tower servers cost-effective and feasible server solutions that synchronize CAPEX and OPEX with workloads.

### 7. Synergy Strengthens the Concept of Financial IT Simplification

Large rack servers not only increase the infrastructure but also increase the effort required to support the infrastructure they bring. On the other hand, edge and tower servers facilitate consolidation of workloads that earlier demanded different specialized rack servers. Their product offerings incorporate AI inferencing, streaming analytics, SDS and cloud-native features within individual enclosures. Therefore, financial IT can supervise fewer devices and redirect its attention to catalyzing changes.

### 8. Improving the Environmental Impact Also Strengthens CSR Initiatives

[Rack servers](https://www.lenovo.com/ca/en/c/servers-storage/servers/racks/) are infamous for their power consumption, even in low-workload states. To combat this edge, tower servers employ optimized components and intelligence to reduce this power consumption to the right level. Furthermore, their densities enable financial firms to retire many underutilized or obsolete physical servers to save costs. These collective optimizations generally reduce carbon emissions in a way that enhances CSR postures.

#### Final Thoughts

What was once seen as the forte of rack servers, phases for the edge, and tower servers offer certain benefits in terms of density, redundancy, flexibility, protection, affordability, ease of integration or sustainability. It is for this reason that they can be easily integrated into a variety of dynamic finance workloads, which makes them a common feature in modern financial IT architectures. When CIOs in the financial services industry are redesigning infrastructure, look for edge and tower servers to become the new normal while replacing traditional rack servers. Their future-ready advantages enable financial firms to be fully prepared for innovation, all while achieving the lowest TCO possible.