Mobile Devices, Cloud, Applications Drive Server Design Diversity
December 31, 2013
Grazed from eWeek. Author: Jeff Burt.
When Verizon began laying the groundwork several years ago for its new public cloud, company IT executives set several goals for the environment. They wanted consistent performance, high security and availability, and they didn’t want customers to have to modify their applications in order to run them in the cloud. They wanted few moving parts and no special hardware.
"We wanted very few actual hardware components," Paul Curtis, chief architect of cloud computing at Verizon, said during Advanced Micro Device’s Developer Summit 2013 in November. "My boss said, ‘I only have five fingers in my hand. Don’t make me use them all.’" There was to be "no honking router outside of this. … No special firewall, no special anything. It just doesn’t scale."…
What Verizon quickly settled on was SeaMicro, a small company that at the time was making small, highly energy-efficient microservers that could be used in very dense data center environments and are linked via the company’s Freedom Fabric. SeaMicro has since become part of AMD, which bought the company in February 2012 for $344 million…
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