#HewlettPackardEnterprise is hosting its first big shindig, the Discover Europe customer and partner conference, as a company separated from PCs and printers, and is trotting out a new line of systems, code named “ #Thunderbird ” and sold under the brand #HPE #Synergy, that are follow-ons to its BladeSystem blade servers. The Thunderbirds are the foundation for what HP and rival #Cisco Systems are calling composable infrastructure.
With composable infrastructure, the idea is to take “infrastructure as code” to the same extreme that the hyperscalers do. But as we pointed out when this idea started being bandied about this year, to provide truly composable infrastructure, the tight coupling between the CPU and its main memory (whether it is DRAM, MCDRAM, or 3D XPoint in the case of Intel) must be shattered and then allowed to be configured on the fly. (You cannot do this today. A system board has a set number of processors and a set number of memory slots, and that is that.)
We discussed this idea both with Hewlett-Packard in June and with Cisco Systems in November, and everyone agrees that customers must be able to add memory independently from compute and, equally importantly, be able to support multiple generations of compute and memory within the same complex of racks and rows, for infrastructure to be the fluid resource pools that HP and Cisco are describing. Presumably, the CPUs and memory will all be linked by silicon photonics light pipes.
http://www.nextplatform.com/2015/12/01/hpe-synergy-lays-foundation-for-composable-infrastructure/
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