Intel’s launch event held on April 2, 2019 served as a forum to announce new products designed to tackle three distinct areas in Enterprise IT. - compute, persistent storage, and networking. Combined, the products should lead to new servers optimized for better cloud computing platforms.

Any of the products on their own would be exciting, but by discussing them together, it is easier for customers to get a sense of the bigger picture. These techs are a huge leap in overall server capability. A new server fitted with each of these components should be a significant upgrade over the previous generation device. Optane storage alone would be a great improvement, but when you combine the faster persistent storage with new processors providing more cores and faster, smarter networking it is clear that we are in a different league.

The next generation of servers should allow for virtual machine consolidation like we haven’t seen for quite some time now. It is here that I expect to see serious gains for vendors providing on premises hybrid cloud infrastructure such as Azure Stack, Oracle’s Exadata platform, and Amazon Outpost. The benefit of cloud is being able to consume as much capacity as you can afford; that vision is compromised whenever “the cloud” is reduced to a single rack of gear. It’s clear to see that the illusion can be maintained just a little longer when a single CPU can provide up to 56 cores.

Having east-west traffic between nodes running at 100GB allows those virtual machines within the rack to be moved to different hosts without penalty. Databases and app nodes would not necessarily need to be placed on the same node for optimal efficiency. Cloud is most useful when admins can go hands-off when it comes to lower level functions and still feel comfortable that they are not sacrificing performance.

The Dell Technologies World conference held April 29 - May 2, 2019 could give us a look at some systems that leverage this technology.

Links

Tech Field Day Intel Event - https://techfieldday.com/event/inteldcevent/

Dell Technologies World - https://www.delltechnologiesworld.com/index.htm