The 2016 Open Server Summit took place last week at the Santa Clara Convention Center and iXsystems was there with a booth and session on Open Source storage.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same” is rarely something you hear in technology but I consider that to be the informal theme of the 2016 Open Server Summit. There is no question that every server technology has gotten smaller, faster and cheaper over the years but we are seeing a return to “outdated” technologies like linear memory access in the relentless pursuit of performance. Storage is being pushed closer and closer to the CPU in the form of NVDIMMs, NVMe cards, and FGPA (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) cards with on-board storage. “Wrap your application around your data” is how one speaker put it and that is becoming possible for numerous smaller applications like databases. Dedicated FPGAs for network packet filtering and compression/decompression were on display and it’s becoming clear that with the ever-decreasing cost of hardware, you can increasingly rearrange your computing stack to meet the needs of your application.
OpenStack received the most attention of the Open Source solutions and it appears that a giant virtual slider is emerging between “full-featured” solutions at the OpenStack end, and ‘bare-minimum” solutions at the Docker end. BSD Unix has generally defended the middle ground between these two extremes but you can look forward to more ebbing and flowing of technologies like consolidated virtualization and distributed IoT. Above all, choice, and in turn freedom will be the longer-term themes of the server market.
My talk was entitled “Six Reasons Why You Must Use Open Source Storage Technology” and I gave a history of the key technologies and companies, including iXsystems, that came out of the U.C. Berkeley Computer Science Research Group. I also explained how OpenZFS is the only real choice we have for a modern file system. You may not know that the CSRG produced the first working TCP/IP implementation, and thus the Internet, plus the notion of application containment and permissive licensing. In fact, the CSRG’s effort to remove the last remnants of AT&T code from BSD Unix is recognized as the first collaborative Open Source development using the Internet. The rest, as they say, is history.
The iXsystems Sales team demonstrated a TrueNAS storage array and a “Fat Twin” server that featured eight computing nodes in a single 4U enclosure. Just about the funniest thing I heard on the show floor was a vendor of an ASIC card dedicated to compression/decompression saying that, “We stopped supporting Microsoft Windows; it was too much trouble”. Yes, Windows is being dropped as a supported platform and I think we will see more and more of that in the server space as the industry moves to Open Source solutions. The data center is going the way of the supercomputer in this regard, turning to Open Source as the de facto standard for operating systems.
Lastly, the ARM64 and Power platforms made a strong showing, confirming that we are gradually exiting the “WinTel” era that has dominated the last 35 years of computing. I can safely say I do not know what the dominant server processor will be ten years from now, especially having served on the student committee that decided on a 64-bit DEC Alpha processor-based system in the mid-1990s. I encourage you to attend events like the Open Server Summit to meet industry experts face-to-face and see first hand what technologies are coming to your datacenter.
Michael Dexter
Senior Analyst
