Servers Incorporated

Servers are the foundation of IT, the workhorses of the data center, and they're also the lynchpin of the burgeoning hyper-convergence market.

So far this year, the folks at VCE, EMC's hyper-converged infrastructure division, have sung the praises of Dell's FX line of servers, Lenovo has pumped up its ThinkServer to tackle software-defined workloads, and HPE has worked its ProLiant line into an appliance that solution providers call a game-changer.

Add to that list Cisco's release of its HyperFlex line of hyper-converged appliances based on its well-known UCS server, and you could say the first half of the year was when legacy server vendors jumped into hyper-convergence in earnest.

Click through to see the 10 coolest servers of 2016 so far.

(For more on the "coolest" of 2016, check out "CRN's Tech Midyear In Review.")