HP and Foxconn Announce Joint CloudLine Open Compute Servers
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This Open Compute project is making quite a few headlines. Good to see open source hardware starting to take over the market.
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I agree. I know that @cakeis_not_alie is a big proponent of the open compute initiative as well. I think that Open Compute as a long ramp up period ahead of it but that it will become a dominant player or, at least, a dominant model for the industry.
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If you think about it, in many ways Open Compute is the natural extension of the commodity server market. As great as Proliant and PowerEdge are, commodity servers are actually much alike once you discount the out of band management upgrades and hardware RAID, both of which could be included purely as proprietary upgrades to any open hardware. The whole point of the commodity market mostly pushes it to an open standard such as this.
Proprietary systems will always have a place. But the reality is is that the systems we assume are most proprietary like IBM Power and Oracle Sparc are actually completely open and have been for years or decades. Hardware is moving towards open at a steady pace.
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@scottalanmiller I was thinking about the commodity market when this came up. This model really makes sense at almost any scale from SMB to companies like Google and Facebook.
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@coliver said:
@scottalanmiller I was thinking about the commodity market when this came up. This model really makes sense at almost any scale from SMB to companies like Google and Facebook.
A little less at SMB scale, but still some sense, just not the overwhelming sense. When you are buying a single server, like most of the SMB does or should be (or no servers, that's a viable option too) then having the extra stuff that HP or Dell provide is often worth it. It's a minor investment to make up for a lack of scale. But when you get to any real scale that value drops away very quickly.
I hope that Dell follows up with an Open Compute offering too. Not that I like Dell more than HP, they both rock. I'd just like to see parity in the market with them competing to make an awesome, low cost solution from a major supply line.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
@scottalanmiller I was thinking about the commodity market when this came up. This model really makes sense at almost any scale from SMB to companies like Google and Facebook.
A little less at SMB scale, but still some sense, just not the overwhelming sense. When you are buying a single server, like most of the SMB does or should be (or no servers, that's a viable option too) then having the extra stuff that HP or Dell provide is often worth it. It's a minor investment to make up for a lack of scale. But when you get to any real scale that value drops away very quickly.
I hope that Dell follows up with an Open Compute offering too. Not that I like Dell more than HP, they both rock. I'd just like to see parity in the market with them competing to make an awesome, low cost solution from a major supply line.
Scale is a big factor. It's the only reason google's crappy desktop motherboard, single psu. Single HDD model works. They have have a lot of nodes. The nodes, don't matter. The redundancy isn't in the nodes, it's in the network of the nodes.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
Scale is a big factor. It's the only reason google's crappy desktop motherboard, single psu. Single HDD model works. They have have a lot of nodes. The nodes, don't matter. The redundancy isn't in the nodes, it's in the network of the nodes.
Same logic for Facebook's datacenter or BackBlaze's storage pods. Disposable nodes in large quantity.
