Reg man howls over HPE Moonshot IoT box A Moonshot-class, Internet of Things HPE server is being used for down to Earth VDI by Citrix. HPE’s Edgeline servers are for the use of connected "Things" at an IoT network's edge, the place where end-point device data is aggregated and processed before being sent to a central location. What HPE has realised is that this is …
The mundane is often the bread and butter.
Fancy features for shiny things are well and good but not everyone needs all of the fantastic features (or said features don't work as marketed......cynical, me? Never...) but if you can fill a need then all the better.
For the record I can think of a good use for 4 nodes in having capacity fail over for vmware servers, though I'd be interested if you could hot swap a node out. That'd be dawned handy.
Did you even read from the link? The chassis is only 17"x23". What is not stated is that each cartridge is only approx 6.5"x7.24" and only 0.78" thick. The diagram is 100% incorrect, all 4 cartridges are up front stacked 2 per side. The rear is 2 PSU's and the choice of PCIe or PXI frame.
Does it help that it meets NEBS level 3, and will operate at up to 55c and accept -48VDC? conditions. Come on that has to mean something for datacenter type of processing at the edge. The original design concept was for it to be installed in retail chain stores, to sit in a dirty closet or on some managers desk.
What I can say is that I just left HPE ES, but my work there led to many a raised eyebrow in the DoD for use in tactical situations.The HPE Federal team has a sub contractor ready to offer it in Mil-Spec 810G and others for use in extreme harsh environments. I concepted having 3 or 4 of these in a transit case giving me 16 cartridges in 4U. That provided me upto 256 cores of compute. Add that the m510 holds 3 and m710x holds 4 of the newer format M.2 storage. So on the m510 2 of M2. could be 1TB meaning 2TB per cartridge, the intent was to use some form of san virtualization to create a hypervisor cluster with upto 32TB of storage. Might not sound like much, but in a truly portable/tactical situation it was. And the variant idea was to use 12 m510's to provide 192 cores of hypervisor cluster, and 4 m710x with the GPU to provide a tactical capable of providing field ready VDI. Overarching goal was to provide a software defined datacenter in a box.
I was personally asking the Edgeline team to enable support the m800, a quad TI based 66AK2H processor. So in this config it offer 4 cores of ARM and 8 cores of C66x DSP per SoC, giving 16 cores of ARM and 32 Cores of DSP per cartridge. My goal here was due to the PXI options for running the already supported National Instruments FlexRIO cards, it would be able to support the concept of the above mentioned SDDC with Software Defined Radio. With the HPE capability to run NSA suiteB functions to provide field crypto without the need for an over priced mil-spec'd harris setup. Again many in the DoD and intel agencies did like the idea.
Not sure if that helps anyone see the vision for future use of the EL4000. But it was doing well for my job.
... that would slip into such a small (1U high) enclosure, with four cartridges side by side that could be hot-swapped via the front panel without using any tool ...
But that would mean quite some extra efforts, starting from mundane things like additional connectors, wiring and brackets that aren't rocket science but nonetheless need precision engineering - and would be quite costly.
If there is a market for that, someone will probably pick up the idea. But I'm not holding my breath ...
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