HP’s Donatelli talked about new Intel Atom and ARM-based server and potential storage.
Any insight on what VMware/Virtualiztion can do these platforms?
AllThingsD: The big announcement today was about storage. What’s the important message on that subject from HP that you want people to take away today?
Donatelli: Well, I think the top-level message is that with converged infrastructure, which is a strategy that HP has outlined, we’re out to reinvent the entire infrastructure industry. We’ve made major changes in the network industry, and we’ve done that over time. We’ve made major changes in servers, as with our recent announcement that we’re going to build servers with Intel Atom and ARM-based chips. It’s a total reinvention of what servers do. And then with storage, we think we’re doing the same thing. Most people look at storage as a pyramid with different tiers and different ways they address those tiers. Our competitors address those tiers with product after product, and the result is that to customers it becomes really complex and frustrating. What we’re doing with both backup and primary storage is taking what used to require multiple products and instead delivering one single product. With primary storage it’s 3PAR, and for backup, it’s a product called StoreOnce.
Let’s see how much improvement Atom/ARM can make on ratio of computing density / heating density. If either of them can’t do better than the current do, I do not think they could success.
About this, I have some different thoughts. For now many DC stuffed from IT room environment management due to high heating density, which is caused by computing density and lead system to panic.
I love ATOM / ARM system, which has better processing efficiency benefiting from its pipe design, which also need support from app coding.
On your article, section “14 kilowatts per Rack”, it is always better than most of current x86 system.
Atom is X86 IA32 instruction Set, and ARM is RISC instruction Set. As this, I do not think either of them are good choice for ESX environment, To Atom, the IA32 does not support large enough RAM addressing, To ARM, will VM has new layer for X86<->RISC?
Whether or not virtualize ARM/ATOM platform will be highly depending on applications and use cases. From what I can imagine, I believe it is definitely needed on the mobile computing devices. So let's wait and see.
wwn1
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Posted June 7th, 2012 07:00
I think the performance is more critical than compute density and heating density. In fact, SeaMicro already packs 768 Cores Into its Atom Server.
More details:
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/07/18/seamicro-packs-768-cores-into-its-atom-server/