A little over a year ago, I wrote an article titled, “Why Blade Servers Will be the Core of Future Data Centers” where I coined the name “Rackplane” which described the concept of future data centers designed with rack sized systems capable of having blade server like compute, memory, I/O, network and storage nodes all communicating at high speeds. While my vision is pure speculation (and was imagined before my current employment with Dell), Intel and Facebook seem to be creating a vision of the future of data centers that is similar to mine. Continue reading
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Why Blade Servers Will be the Core of Future Data Centers
In 1965, Gordon Moore predicted that engineers would be able to double the number of components on a microchip every two years. Known as Moore’s law, his prediction has come true – processors are continuing to become faster each year while the components are becoming smaller and smaller. In the footprint of the original ENIAC computer, we can today fit thousands of CPUs that offer a trillion more computes per seconds at a fraction of the cost. This continued trend is allowing server manufactures to shrink the footprint of the typical x86 blade server allowing more I/O expansion, more CPUs and more memory. Will this continued trend allow blade servers to gain market share, or could it possibly be the end of rack servers? My vision of the next generation data center could answer that question.