3 ms·
Seems we've come full circle, eh? Back in the original dot-com boom ~15 years ago 1U pizza boxes were the workhorses. Same for things like HPC clusters. Then
by jabl 10y ago
Seems we've come full circle, eh?
Back in the original dot-com boom ~15 years ago 1U pizza boxes were the workhorses. Same for things like HPC clusters.
Then the big-name vendors started introducing various blade server architectures, where many servers shared power/cooling/BMC (out of band management), often with things like integrated switches in the back of the blade chassis. (Of course, many thought the real reason behind blades were that standard rack servers were rapidly becoming commoditized, so the vendors needed something with more lock-in..)
And then we had things like "scale-out" designs, with somewhat bare-bones servers, often in some simple chassis with shared power. And lately (Intel at least?) there has been talk of "rack-scale" architectures.
But now MS goes against this "trend", going back to basics so to speak. What gives?
- walrus01 10y agoThe nice thing about using 1U size chassis is that you aren't reliant on a vendor specific backplane interconnect for the blade-to-blade-chassis interface. It takes advantage of much larger economies of scale in standard AC or DC power feed interconnects and ethernet (25/50/100G ethernet). And if you buy a huge enough number of things you can get a Taiwanese motherboard OEM to design you a custom ATX (12x9.6") or full size (12x13") dual socket motherboard with all the extraneous crap stripped off, like VGA displays, USB ports, 2.5mm headphone jacks, etc. There are "standard" widths and lengths of 1U size power supplies (Whether AC input or DC input) that are used by dozens of different system integrators. Order off the shelf based on the wattage and capabilities you need. Same thing with the chassis. At a certain quantity level you basically have a folded steel box with mounting screw holes for ATX or larger-than-ATX motherboards. With M.2 SSDs on the motherboard these days, you need only a few things: a) a long 1U steel box with high speed 40mm fans sucking air through it b) motherboard with cpu/heatsink/ram/storage mounted on it. c) power supplies.
- wmf 10y agoOne thing that MS can't say yet is that a Skylake-EP server is "rumored" to have a larger socket and 24 DIMM slots instead of 16 so it needs to be physically wider.
- walrus01 10y agoThere's the old telecom standard for 23" racks... Other than facebook I wonder who is building new hot aisle/cold aisle separated environments for wider-than-19" standard.
- wmf 10y agoI mean the old MS servers are 9.5" wide and the new Skylake servers need to be wider than that so they're going to 19". Facebook/Google/Rackspace use a 21" rack but MS and LinkedIn are using 19".
- jabl 10y agoToday you can get these tray servers with two trays in 1U (or 4 tray servers in a 2U chassis, typically), where each server is a standard 2 socket Xeon(-EP?) thing. So surely if you suddenly have twice the width you can cram in a few extra DIMM slots without having to go wider than the usual 19" racks.