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Composable Infrastructure

Compose Your Next Infrastructure Masterpiece with Liqid

The overall promise of composable infrastructure is flexibility, and like many solutions the choice of vendor depends on how much you value simplicity vs. flexibility. Liqid is a providing a more flexible solution for customers in exchange for simplicity. Being able to choose from multiple hardware vendors and also select the fabric that is the best fit is very attractive for a large number of customers, even if it requires more thoughtful planning.

Why Would Microsoft Buy Mellanox?

News came out today in The Marker that Microsoft is looking into an acquisition of Mellanox. This would likely mark a major shift to in-house hardware development for Azure, and could form the basis of a composable cloud offering in Microsoft’s cloud. But it would also take a major (if un-heralded) player out of the market for everyone else.

Liqid Takes Composable Infrastructure to a New Level

I’ve been keen on rack-scale composable infrastructure for years. Decades even. But it’s only recently that we’ve had the technology to make it happen. You can now create a system or a rack that can flexibly allocate storage and compute using a shared I/O channel. But what if you could add more elements and “decompose” the server further? That’s what Liqid is promising with their latest announcements.

Openness and Composable Systems

Openness, it seems, is “in the air.” While the Liqid folks were over at OCP, Russ White was over at the Open Networking Summit (ONS), where he attended the Linux Foundation (Networking), or LF(N), board meeting. What was interesting at this year’s summit is just how little the focus of open network is on bare metal routers and switches, and how much of the focus is on server-based and overlay networking. The last mile, as it were, in the data center is becoming ever more important. This just shows the question hanging over the network has not changed much in the last twenty years: how much intelligence will be pushed into the network, and how much in the host?

GPUs and Composable Computing

In our latest Tech Talk series with Liqid, Russ White looks at why composable infrastructure is ideally suited to answer a prickly question in GPU computing: How many processors is this job going to require?

Flexible Scaleout, Tom Lyon, and Reveal(x) in Gestalt News 18.8

In this edition of Gestalt News:
– Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at ExtraHop Reveal(x)
– DriveScale’s Tom Lyon sits down for an IT Origins interview
– Russ White considers if flexible scaleout in design could have mitigated the Meltdown vulnerability