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I haven't dug through all the marketing speak yet but this seems like it's tangentially related to WD's He8 converged servers they've been sampling, which were

I haven't dug through all the marketing speak yet but this seems like it's tangentially related to WD's He8 converged servers they've been sampling, which were ARM-based and ran Debian Jessie. [0] Although when I saw them spoke about in Redhat Summit of course they were mooted to be running RHEL. It would be interesting to see if WD Labs is now sampling RISC-V-based boards running Redhat and Ceph OSD software which like the He8. I found the whole concept of on-board PCB with dual gig ethernet ports fascinating and I believe there's a second generation with faster network speeds. Unfortunately WD never seem to have gone mainstream with it. [0] http://ceph.com/geen-categorie/500-osd-ceph-cluster/ http://ceph.com/geen-categorie/500-osd-ceph-cluster/

lovemenot 9y ago
Language used in the article - edge computing and fast data - suggests WD is going after potential new markets indicated in the a16z presentation [1]. The He8 concept seems to make sense in that context. So it would not be surprising to see RISC-V extended to better support this new category: call it locally-edge-attached-fast-storage. [1] https://a16z.com/2016/12/16/the-end-of-cloud-computing/ https://a16z.com/2016/12/16/the-end-of-cloud-computing/
kijiki 9y ago
I am similarly disappointed that this didn't go mainstream. At Cumulus we did a follow up experiment to the one in your link, with the WD labs folks using Cumulus Linux switches. The idea was that you'd run the Ceph monitors on the switches, and the OSDs on the hard drives, and you'd have an entire storage array with no servers needed. Was very neat, but pointless unless you can buy the drives...
- sitkack 9y ago
  WD could easily take on Intel and AMD for datacenter workloads if computation starts moving to the drives. Drives have mass causing more Data Gravity. Data Gravity is literally money.

lovemenot 9y ago

Language used in the article - edge computing and fast data - suggests WD is going after potential new markets indicated in the a16z presentation [1]. The He8 concept seems to make sense in that context. So it would not be surprising to see RISC-V extended to better support this new category: call it locally-edge-attached-fast-storage. [1] https://a16z.com/2016/12/16/the-end-of-cloud-computing/ https://a16z.com/2016/12/16/the-end-of-cloud-computing/

kijiki 9y ago

I am similarly disappointed that this didn't go mainstream. At Cumulus we did a follow up experiment to the one in your link, with the WD labs folks using Cumulus Linux switches. The idea was that you'd run the Ceph monitors on the switches, and the OSDs on the hard drives, and you'd have an entire storage array with no servers needed. Was very neat, but pointless unless you can buy the drives...

sitkack 9y ago
WD could easily take on Intel and AMD for datacenter workloads if computation starts moving to the drives. Drives have mass causing more Data Gravity. Data Gravity is literally money.