neoTactics

GigaOm’s Pizza Boxes Need New Toppings

Our beloved GigaOm ponders on pizza box servers and their possible replacement by Big IronTM in a new article.

After perusing the article and comments I thought it was worth weighing in. So called pizza box servers (1U or 2U form factor systems) are definitely the king in any datacenter that I visit. But the likelihood of them being displaced by Big Iron or even blade servers is unlikely.

It’s simply a matter of economics. Both Big Iron and blade technology require significantly larger engineering resources, while pizza boxes are commodity systems. The issues around power consumption are a red herring. Customer desire for commodity systems will continue to drive low power tech like AMD’s HE processors and Sun’s Niagara systems into the pizza box form factor.

As far as utilization, we’re well on the road to a world where virtualization technology drives utilization efficiency. Virtualization of compute (CPU+RAM), storage, and network combined with cheap commodity hardware will not only drive efficiencies in this regard, but increase flexibility and change the way that we create, deploy, and run operational infrastructure. Big Iron has no place in such a world. Blade systems have a place, but ultimately make more sense for larger well-established players, not your average datacenter customer.

In my mind the future holds ever more power and cooling efficient pizza boxes, possibly pre-fabricated into larger containers (literally). Given Moore’s Law, the push towards progressively more cores, and coming ubiquity of virtualization technology it makes more sense to have *cheaper*, easily replaceable, easily recyclable servers than those with excessive engineering and cost associated with them.

This is a world of pre-fabricated, efficient, recyclable physical infrastructure wrapped with virtualization and driven by sophisticated automation tools.

2 comments December 20th, 2007

Amazon Web Services vs. Google

Dave Winer breaks it down on why AWS matters, asking why Google and Microsoft seem to be missing the boat.

Of course, insiders are aware that Google is almost certainly going to launch MapReduce as a service, or similar, inside the next year. Still, the real news here, to me, is that Amazon is moving forward incredibly fast. In terms of playing to strengths, they seem to be in a tremendously powerful position, already offering:

• Flexible Payment Service (FPS)
• Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
• Simple Queuing Service (SQS)
• Mechanical Turk
• Alex Web Services
• Simple DB (SDB)

That’s a tremendous amount of catching up to do even if Google wanted to or was geared internally to produce a service beyond MapReduce.

The train has left the station . . .

Add comment December 16th, 2007

Virtualization and Organization Sitting in a Tree …

Wow, virtualization, organization, and management of systems are not only on the rise, but continue to converge, as I thought they would. The latest announcement is Cisco’s foray into managing and orchestrating network and datacenter resources.

Not to mention Opsware was acquired by HP (a big backer of virtualization) for a cool 1.6B, XenSource acquired by Citrix for $500M on $3M revenue, and of course the stellar IPO of VMware.

All of this leads me to believe the timing on the startup I’m involved with, CloudScale Networks couldn’t be better.

I’m really looking forward to this new frontier. Virtualization and the requirement for finding new ways to manage more and more virtualized systems is going to have a dramatic effect on the way we build and run operational infrastructure.

Add comment August 17th, 2007