4 ms·
Startup idea: blades that self-interconnect wirelessly at short distances Why are we still cabling (it's def. cheap, but man-hour time to cable is expensive
by bfung 14y ago
Startup idea:
blades that self-interconnect wirelessly at short distances
Why are we still cabling (it's def. cheap, but man-hour time to cable is expensive)?
- PotatoEngineer 14y agoProbably because there's limited wireless bandwidth. It'll work, but it doesn't scale - doubly so for colocation, where other customers might eat your bandwidth. The "short distances" would help, but there might not be enough throughput to make it worthwhile.
- rurounijones 14y agoI have always wondered why servers don't have wireless adapters for cluster heartbeats / elections / fencing etc. With heartbeating etc. you want the minimal number of moving parts required (minimal chance of failuer). The heartbeat is not high traffic and can be picked up by all servers in a cluster without worring about network faults. Seems like a win-win, but then I am not a data-center expert.
- oasisbob 14y agoFate-sharing is one good reason. There are probably more.
- sp332 14y agoIt's being worked on :) The plans I've seen use 60 GHz spectrum, which is very short-range (shorter than an average datacenter) and line-of-sight. The latest proposal used beamforming to bounce the signal off a ceiling or wall to further reduce interference among nodes. https://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/publications/abstracts/beam3d-hotnets11.html https://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/publications/abstracts/bea... Making this automatic would be awesome :)