back to article Those converged infrastructure vendors are cannibals, I tell you

Commodity server shipments are booming but there is a sting in the tail for specialist vendors, who are seeing their hardware sales cannibalised. Instead of buying storage arrays or network appliances, for example, tech customers are buying or developing specialist software that runs on cheap boxes. So there is more than hype …

  1. a_yank_lurker

    Puzzled

    With the growth of the cloud, more storage thus servers will be needed. One would think the overall shipments would be strong. What may be happening is commodity servers are so good for many applications that paying a price premium is rarely justified.

  2. another_vulture

    Do I understand correctly?

    The article appears to say that a "converged" datacenter is just a bunch of commodity servers, each of which contributes CPU, memory, and storage to the "cloud", presumably via a really serious LAN connection in a "flat" topology. Magic software then makes appropriate use of these resources. This means that there is no need for specialized storage nodes. Therefore, proprietary magic software in the storage nodes is replaced by commodity magic software on the commodity nodes, and vendors of speciality storage nodes are screwed.

    Sounds good to me, but I'm an OpenSource fanatic anyway. Basically, this architecture will enable the use of storage hierarchies within each commodity node that can move beyond the legacy SAS and SATA interfaces to PCI-e or memory interfaces, without requiring a massive and expensive upgrade of a legacy storage node. Of course, the magic software will need to deal with heterogeneous storage capabilities of nodes in the datacenter. We live in interesting times.

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