

MicroSlice based servers - timf
http://www.rackable.com/products/microslice.aspx?nid=servers_5

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jws
Interesting packaging. 6 mini-itx boards, each with a 2.5" drive in a 1U form
factor. 44U in a rack and you get their 264 servers number. It does not appear
to have redundant power supplies.

They talk about smashing the $500 per node price point for hardware, so there
is plenty of room for profit in their model.

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timf
Ah thanks, I did not notice the itx part, somehow. That's cool. I had a 1U in
colocation for a while and was thinking wouldn't it be convenient to put two
mini-itx boards in there with a hub to have some real redundancy.

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timf
> _physicalization takes a hardware-based approach to dividing those resources
> into independent, TCO-optimized, single socket compute nodes_

Anyone have any concrete idea about what they are talking about? Specialized
VLAN + management platform?

Vague press release... (what's new)

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wmf
They mean why bother splitting a large server into a bunch of small virtual
servers when it is cheaper to simply buy a bunch of small servers? I don't
think they provide any management tools other than the usual IPMI stuff, so
what you do with all those servers is up to you.

More details:
[http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/01/15/TheCaseForLowCos...](http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/01/15/TheCaseForLowCostLowPowerServers.aspx)

~~~
Xichekolas
> _why bother splitting a large server into a bunch of small virtual servers
> when it is cheaper to simply buy a bunch of small servers_

One word: flexibility.

VMs can grow up to the size of the dedicated server they are on. These tiny
hardware platforms cannot. They must resort to parallelism much earlier than
more beefy servers would.

(Not that I was accusing you of supporting the claim... merely pointing out
that I think their idea is flawed... even if the hardware is neato!)

Given a sufficiently parallelizable(is that a word?!) workload, these things
could be total win though.

