Musing:Schooner Launches Specialized Servers for Speedy Data Delivery

Here is an inter­est­ing take on mak­ing Cloud Computers. Instead of using com­mod­ity, one-​​size-​​fits-​​all-​​servers, Schooner Technologies make spe­cific ahrd­ware that accel­er­ates cer­tain func­tions. Schooner makes serv­ers that spe­cific­ally accel­er­ate MySQL and mem­cached. If you have worked at large scale dot com’s, this could be a big win. When Cloud Computing moves to a SaaS archi­tec­ture you are most likely to use these exact tech­no­lo­gies to scale up your Enterprise Cloud.

It wasn’t so long ago that com­puters have many hard­ware archi­tec­tures (MIPS, RISC, PowerPC and even Intel) and dif­fer­ent hard­ware per­formed bet­ter at cer­tain tasks. So the idea isn’t new, but the mar­ket wanted one CPU archi­tec­ture to make it easy to under­stand and buy. CIO’s couldn’t com­pre­hend the dif­fer­ences and just sim­pli­fied their decisions to a single hard­ware platform.

But the scale of today’s Cloud oper­a­tions means that spe­cial­ist options could be return­ing. For example. Cisco UCS could be regarded as a hard­ware vari­ant on the Intel plat­form that is highly cus­tom­ised for Cloud Computing type clusters. And HP Virtual Connect is equally a hard­ware cus­tom­isa­tion to improve the net­work per­form­ance for vir­tu­al­ised servers.

It’s an inter­est­ing idea that hard­ware cus­tom­isa­tion might be return­ing the market.

All about Nehalem’s

On a slightly dif­fer­ent note, many recent announce­ment are based on Intel Nehalem. It would seem that this CPU archi­tec­ture unlocks a vast array of new fea­tures for many new entrants to the mar­ket. Certainly, HP & IBM haven’t made much smoke on their Nehalem plat­forms. I won­der why ?

Credit

Schooner Launches Specialized Servers for Speedy Data Delivery: “GigaOM”

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