I would love a mini version of this for homelabs.
If the software stack ends up being open source someone could make a name for themself by porting it to run on Linux + random hardware.
Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
91–100 of 264 posts
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#92It sure looks pretty, but appears to be - - dedicated to virtualization, done their way - rather inflexible in hardware specs - vendor-locked at the rack - if you have hardware from someone else, it can't live in the same cabinet I guess if you just want a pretty data center in a box and look like what they consider a 'normal' enterprise to be, it might appeal. But I'm not sure how many people asked for Apple-style h…
Why is it important what kind of virtualization? It works and since it is built for this hardware it will likely be more reliable then anything you're putting together yourself. The specs are damn good. When it is all top-of-the-line, inflexibility is kind of a mute point. Where else are you going to go? > But I'm not sure how many people asked for Apple-style hardware in the DC. Well integrated, performant and relia…
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Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#93>AMD MILAN Intel is losing on the client and server. everyone is jumping ship to either ARM or AMD for client/server. hopefully Intel new engineer CEO can turn it around like AMD engineer CEO (Lisa Su)
ARM I've seen evidence people are jumping ship too, but is the same true of AMD? This is the best shot they're going to get at it and I for one haven't heard all that much noise pro-AMD.
They make really nice chips, but what happens if BigCorpXYZ just gets a quote from AMD and goes straight to Intel to get it matched - i.e. the Cloud isn't that performance-intensive, so now they get to stay on the Intel stack for less money.
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#94Why the elevation constraint? "The elevation of the room where the rack is installed must be below 10,005 feet (3,050 meters)."
probably air density cooling solution is qualified for.
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#95Why the elevation constraint? "The elevation of the room where the rack is installed must be below 10,005 feet (3,050 meters)."
Perhaps a constraint on cooling effectiveness due to air density?
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
This level of integration surely won't come cheap, from what I recall of Server purchasing a target price of ~200-500k per rack would be expected on a TCO of roughly 2x the rack price over 3 years. (Assuming you are buying from Quanta/SuperMicro or other commodity integrator) It's possible the prices are different now, but you would need customers looking to drop > 1 million dollars in CapEx for the management capabi…
The core customer profile appears to be aging startups that know how their software behaves and are currently way over 2k cores on AWS.
Startups with no significant use of anything from AWS other than EC2+EBS with an existing well-tested storage migration procedure.
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it important what kind of virtualization? It works and since it is built for this hardware it will likely be more reliable then anything you're putting together yourself. The specs are damn good. When it is all top-of-the-line, inflexibility is kind of a mute point. Where else are you going to go? > But I'm not sure how many people asked for Apple-style hardware in the DC. Well integrated, performant and relia…
> Why is it important what kind of virtualization? Because if I ran this, would have to manage it. Given that I have lots of virtualization to manage already, I would want it to use the same tooling for rather obvious reasons. > is pretty much all everyone running their own hardware is looking for. I don't think you talk to many people who do this, but as someone who manages 8 figures worth of hardware, I can tell yo…
> lots of virtualization to manage already, I would want it to use the same tooling
I'm not saying you would want to, but maybe their expectation is that you'd plan to transition everything to their system. Either gradually as part of the normal cycle of replacing old hardware or all at once if you want to be aggressive.
If their way is actually better, then it might make sense. You'd go through an annoying transition period but be better off in the end.
The hardware options do seem limited, but maybe that would change if their business takes off and they get enough customers to justify it. They're definitely saying simplicity is a good thing, but maybe that's just marketing spin that sounds better than the alternative of saying they're not yet in a position to offer that flexibility.
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#98Why the elevation constraint? "The elevation of the room where the rack is installed must be below 10,005 feet (3,050 meters)."
At 10,000 the air pressure is 1/3 less than at sea level, less density means less capacity for carrying heat, so the cooling might not be sufficient.
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was Mosix at the OS layer in the 1990s and Virtual Iron at the hypervisor layer in the aughts. I think the cost and performance of software SSI just doesn't intersect with demand anywhere.
Plan9 on an oxide rack might get you close to an SSI work-a-like - but I think it's unlikely it'd be a practical use of the hw?
AIUI, Plan9 is not quite fully SSI. It is a distributed OS, and gets quite close, but it's missing support for distributed memory (i.e. software-implemented shared memory exposing a single global address space); it also does not do process checkpointing and auto-migration, without which you don't really have a "global" system image.
Re: Servers as they should be – shipping early 2022
#100This looks great. From a business perspective, I would be concerned that it would be hard to prevent companies like Dell from entering this space as a competitor quite rapidly.
Enterprise vendors are culturally incapable of building opinionated hardware or software. That's a moat, but which side are the customers on?