AWS teases mysterious mil-spec 'Snowblade' server Amazon Web Services has announced a new member of its "Snow" family of on-prem hardware – but the specs of the machine appear not to be available to eyes outside the US military. AWS announced the "Snowblade" on Tuesday, revealing it's a "portable, compact 5U, half-rack width form-factor" that can offer up to 208 vCPUs running …
Granted - but in defence, I present the Compaq Portable, released in 1983. Seems there's a long history of describing luggable hardware as 'portable'!
A friend who was in the Engineers in the 80's told of a bridge element -- all 200 kg of it -- which was described as "light and portable" . If two-three blokes can manhandle into a vehicle it it is is portable in that context. No need for forklifts or cranes: portable and compact.
It depends, we had portable disaster recovery at one customer. If their systems went down, an HGV with a container and generator on the back turned up, with a complete datacenter inside, including Windows servers and VAX.
It was portable, because it could be taken to any customer location to be linked up and put to work.
Portable != for a single person to carry.
Garbage marketing blurbiage: "the device meets MIL-STD-810 standards", which means absolutely nothing as 810 is TEST METHOD standard. So as a matter of fact, I'll bet it doesn't meet those standards at all; rather, it has been tested using them.
The 810 standard is what you use to prove that your widget can operate at temperatures between, say, 25C and 27C and be dropped from a height of 1mm and can be subjected to vibration equivalent to someone walking 50m away. You'd use Method 501.5 for the high temp, 502.5 for the low temp, shock is 516.6 and vibration is 514.6. While some of the Methods include handy data points (like what temps you're going to need for Western Australia -- 30C-49C, as it happens), none of them define requirements, only ways to test against requirements.
I also note in general terms (in the "BA Oxon (failed)" vein) that I've seen cases where a manufacturer has asserted their thing has been tested with MIL-STD-810... which turned out to be true, but omitted the fact that it hadn't passed...
Given the late PM and now ex-MP Boris piffle Johnson hadn't earnt the "(failed)" distinction with his Oxbridge BA and has so convincingly achieved that honour in his subsequent career I would imagine the analogy would be more appropriately "not tested, not passed."
A 5U racked servers is probably more accurately described as movable or mobile than portable. An unracked 2U server sans disks would do my back in so I imagine you would need a couple GIs of Minnesota Swede heritage rather than Chelsea Manning physique to carry this box of goodies.
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