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Could ocp make a rack that behaves like a blade server? Construct a server rack that works like a network Patch panel and server power bus? Thus one would just

• zamadatix 8y ago
  You'd either need a different rack design per particular server or a rack that is overdesigned for 99% of servers plugged into it (e.g. different speeds/counts of network connections). If the thought is the servers will be static for the lifetime of the rack does wiring up a preset rack to a switch really save any time from wiring up preset server designs to a switch? I think it's probably best kept modular.
• ajdecon 8y ago
  There are rack designs out there built on this idea, but they are usually pretty specialized. For example, the Cray XC series has racks with built in power, network, and out of band monitoring. A downside of this kind of thing is that it makes upgrades and maintenance harder, and you often have to do any hardware work on a whole rack at once. Heterogeneous setups get really hard. And it’s usually very vendor specific.
• akhilcacharya 8y ago
  What’s the current industry practice for blades? Does AWS GCP, Azure use them?
  • aviv 8y ago
    Azure does indeed.
  • wmf 8y ago
    Interest in blades seems to have waned. They're still around but tray and twin form factors give similar density with less complexity.
  • Twirrim 8y ago
    > Does AWS GCP, Azure use them? No. Cost / value is not in alignment there. You want your servers to be cheap and disposable. Plus lose the control plane and you lose all the blades within it. There's just no value to it unless you're doing workloads that benefit from a high degree of locality. Cloud services focus on having their networks be as fast as possible so as to reduce the disadvantage of not being highly local. Oracle (my employer), and AWS have been announcing various HPC cloud products where we're starting to focus on highly local, servers with fast interconnects, and it's still not looking at blades. HPC workloads are rather untapped by clouds so far, and it's a big market.
    • akhilcacharya 8y ago
      I work AWS adjacent and I wish there was more externally facing information about how the DC's are operated. It seems like a really neat space.
      • Twirrim 8y ago
        It's more boring than you'd probably expect. Boring is simple, reliable and cheap. The less opportunities for things to go wrong, the better.
• acd 8y ago
  A rack but that has two power feeds in standardized position for each rack unit. When you slide in the server in the rack, you provide power. It would slide in the power connector provided by the rack. More specifically I mean that the server would get automatically connected to IEC 320 C13 female provided by the rack. The modifications to a standard server would be too standardize the position of two 230V/110V power feeds. Alternatively, connect the server to a 48DC bus when its racked in providing +48 volt direct current and ground which can be through the server chassis. Network connectivity should be provided in two standardized positions as well.