Bob Warfield

Bob Warfield's Blog Cisco is planning to start building servers. To be precise, servers equipped with virtualization software. A fascinating article in the New York Times expresses some surprise at this move, but it seems terribly obvious now that the news is out. After all, there is already a move afoot to create Cloud Servers. These are stripped down machines best suited to doing nothing but being the commoditized ubiquitous guts of some massive Cloud data center where there will be thousands of them. The emphasis will be on reliability and cost efficiency. I’ve likened the advantages of such highly standard machines to the business advantage Southwest Airlines gets by standardizing all of their aircraft as 737’s.  Companies like Google have already seen the light and taken these steps. When you look at a server not as a complex machine optimized for maximum perfo... (more)

The Evolution of the Cloud Server Market

Bob Warfield's Blog What features does a server absolutely positively have to have to be a candidate for a big cloud data center?  What features would put it ahead of other servers in the eyes of the manager writing the checks for that cloud computing data center? There’s an interesting article out about how Rackable Systems (and presumably others) are building machines inpsired by Google that answer those questions better than ever before.  We’re talking about features like heat-resistant processors, motherboards that contain 2 servers, and that only need one power supply volta... (more)