[Info-vax] On the topic of Open Compute Designs Possibly Suitable for OpenVMS x86-64

[Bob Gezelter]

Interesting article in Ars Technica on Microsoft's submission for Open Compute.

>From the article:

...

The servers are built for high density and high efficiency. The first version of the Open CloudServer specification (OCS) servers Microsoft published packed 24 server blades into a 12U chassis. Compute blades included a pair of Ivy Bridge-based Intel Xeon processors, up to 192GB RAM, one or two 10gigE ports, and up to four disks; storage blades packed in ten disks. The 12U units share power and networking infrastructure.

The second generation OCS servers, announced today, increase the efficiency and performance. The processors are bumped to Haswell-based Xeons, and the networking upgraded to 40gigE.

The more exotic changes are from the handling of power. The power supplies of each 12U unit now include lithium-ion batteries, something Microsoft calls Local Energy Storage. While lithium-ion batteries are routinely used to power computers--laptops use them--that's not where Microsoft sourced the units for its servers. Instead, it's using batteries from the power tool industry. They're cheap, proven, and abundantly available.

...

Storage performance has also been given a boost, with each blade containing eight M.2 slots, offering support for PCIe-connected solid state drives. This opens the door to massive I/O performance using commodity NAND drives.

As well as its new hardware spec, Microsoft has announced some new partnerships and offerings in the OCS space. Redmond has partnered with Ubuntu developer Canonical to offer "Metal-as-a-Service" deployment: the provisioning of operating systems (Windows, Ubuntu, CentOS, and SUSE) directly onto OCS hardware. This cuts out the virtualization layer normally found in Thing-as-a-Service offerings.

HP has also announced that it will produce OCS-compliant servers named Cloudline.

The full article can be found at:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/microsoft-updates-its-open-server-design-with-a-battery-in-every-box/

- Bob Gezelter, http://www.rlgsc.com