A cloud is something soft and fluffy. When used to describe shared compute services, it means, among other things, that the borders between the various compute services provided and the users of those services are blurred. Why shouldn’t the devices providing these services also be a bit blurry. Servers as we’ve come to know them (I’m mostly talking about x86 servers here) have architectures that are starting to really reach their architectural limits when providing cloud compute services. It’s time for something new and different.
Why couldn’t the hardware of which servers are now comprised be treated differently. Rather than clusters of servers or pools of virtual machines running on clusters of servers, I think it might make more sense for there to be pools of processors, pools of memory, pools of I/O, pools of storage. These can be provisioned in any combination of components as needed to deliver the functionality required by the applications in question.
Instead of racks and racks of servers filling acres of air conditioned space why not have racks or processors and racks of memory and of storage and so forth. Each of these module achieve different densities and consume different power volumes producing different heat profiles. This means that memory and processors which produce the most heat can be cooled separately from other components that produce less heat or storage that works fine at higher temperatures than processors and memory.
I’ll try and explore this idea more at a later time.
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