The excitement around cloud computing has predominantly focused on software. Hardware is like the foundation of a house — necessary, but not exactly something to get too excited about. In an effort to shed the commodity sever paradigm, IBM has launched water-cooled racks of servers designed for cloud computing.
At Earth2Tech we hit on the green aspects of the iDataPlex servers, but didn’t talk about how IBM has stripped out the hardware redundancies of the typical server to make reliability strictly reliant on software. This saves space and power, and is designed to mesh well in the clustered computer environment favored by companies pushing the cloud.
Getting rid of the Power Supply per Box is one step – although blades do this, its not a strategy made in heaven for commercial data centers. Centralized DC power distribution can eliminate up to 30% of the Hysteresis losses in a large server farm. A badly designed DC distribution layout can be a major drag on power, reliability and safety.
I’ve been out the bi Iron business for a few years now; does anyone out there know if the current server offerings can have centralized DC? I know that Dell, HP, Sun probably so not, even very large configurations. I know that IBM’s iron system (main frames) this is a default.
This signals a desperate attempt by IBM to create “specialized” hardware for cloud computing. The amusing contradiction is that a value proposition of cloud computing is to completely commoditize hardware. What firms should be focusing on is how to use existing commodity hardware (mutli-vendor, at that) to create their own “cloud” environments.